PSYC 2650 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Syllogism, Confirmation Bias, Availability Heuristic

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2650
• Professor: skakoon-sparling

Document Summary

Attribute substitution: a commonly used strategy in which someone needs one type of information but relies instead on a more-accessible form of information. This strategy works well if the more-accessible form of information is, in fact, well correlated with the desired information. An example is the case in which someone needs information about how frequent an event is in the world and relies instead on how easily he or she can think of examples of the event. Frequency estimate: an assessment of how often various events have occurred in the past. Availability heuristic: a strategy used to judge the frequency of a certain type of object or the likelihood of a certain type of event. The first step is to assess the ease with which examples of the object or event come to mind; this availability of examples is then used as an index of frequency or likelihood. Representativeness heuristic: a strategy often used in making judgments about categories.