PSY 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Representativeness Heuristic, Availability Heuristic, Hindsight Bias
15 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
Humans are not objective and values seep into work. Need to distinguish between pseudoscience and good science. Values influence which topics we choose to study and our approach to studying it. Study of prejudice flourished during 1940"s; hitler killing jews. Study of conformity flourished during 1950"s; cookie cutter house and follow orders. The same psychological processes that serve us well in most situations also predispose us to errors in thinking . Mental shortcuts to speed up processing of information/stimuli. We are cognitive misers (fiske and taylor, 1991) Unfortunately, can lead us to oversimplify and stereotypes : how to approach family, old people and put ppl into box and see ppl as categories and not idividuas. Common heuristics representative heuristic: judge probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype. Rely on stereotypes, judge a book by its cover.
