PSYCH 360 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Availability Heuristic, Illusory Correlation, Planning Fallacy
16 Feb 2013
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Chapter four: social cognition; thinking about people and situations. Social cognition, interprets the past, understands the present and predicts the future. All how people think and arrive at judgments. A great deal of what we conclude about people based on their faces is determined almost instantaneously. People"s snap judgments about facial appearance may be truthful but not entirely so. Firsthand information is more accurate since it has not been filtered by others, but can also be misguiding since sometimes we perceive things incorrectly. Pluralistic ignorance arises whenever people act in ways that conflict with their private beliefs because of a concern for their social consequences. Example: not asking questions in class about hard material since you assume that everyone else understands but you. Secondhand information comes from secondhand sources, there is no personal knowledge on the subject. Distortion is prevalent in mass media for entertainment purposes and in exaggerations to make things more interesting.
