PSYC 308 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Counterfactual Conditional, Racial Profiling, Thought Suppression
Document Summary
Going for the short cuts for what you think may be the best option; when shopping. Judgmental heuristics: mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently. Availability heuristics: judging based on the ease with which something relevant comes to mind. Sometimes what is easiest to bring to mind is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions. Representative heuristic: classifying something according to how similar it is to a typical case; basing decisions on representativeness. Base rate information: information about the relative frequency of members of different categories in the population. People tend to not use base rate information sufficiently, paying most attention to how representative information about the specific person is of the general category. Problem: base rate fallacy, ignoring info about base rates; how many people fall in a certain category. [failure to use base rate info to overcome salient information].
