PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Representativeness Heuristic, Availability Heuristic, Fallacy
Document Summary
Chapter 4: social cognition- thinking about people and situations: The field of social cognition is the study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgements that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future. If we want to know how a person will react in a given situation, we must understand how the person experiences that situation. Mistakes are informative to psychologist because they provide particularly helpful clues about how people think about others and make inferences about them. Perceptual psychologists study illusions because the help reveal general principles of perception. Social cognition depends first of all on information. But sometimes, people have little or no information on which to base their assessments; sometimes the available information is misleading, sometimes the way people acquire information affects their thinking unduly. Each of these circumstances presents special challenges to achieving an accurate understanding of others.
