PSY 260 Lecture Notes - Katharine Graham, Pessimism, Cybernetics
Document Summary
Beneffectance: taking credit for causing good outcomes to happen while avoiding accepting blame for bad outcomes ex. athletes overestimate their contributions to the teams win, ex. drivers deny responsibility in car accidents. Confirmation bias: the tendency of people to search for information that supports their point of view in preference to challenging information, ex. if they are interviewing an introvert they will ask them do you like to read books? . Feedback: information about how closely an ongoing process is to meeting a standard, ex. the hot and cold game. Totalitarian ego: characterization of the ego as an entity that carefully controls information so as to promote its own positive image self-preserving (greenwald) Feedback loop: a mechanism for controlling the action of a system that involves feedback as to whether or not it is meeting its goals acting, receiving info about succeeding/failing, then acting again.