PSYC 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Availability Heuristic, Belief Perseverance, Confirmation Bias

• School: Binghamton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 111
• Professor: Lanora Duell

Document Summary

Cognition: cognition refers to the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. We organize events, objects, people, and so form into mental groupings called concepts. More often we form a concept by developing a prototype. Problem solving: trial and error - attempting various solutions, algorithm - methodical rule/step-by-step procedure, heuristics - unconscious mental short-cuts. Why we fear the wrong things: we fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear, we fear what we cannot control, we fear what is immediate, we fear what is most readily available in memory. Critical thinkers are often guided by intuition. Creativity: creativity is the ability to produce new and valuable ideas. Divergent thinking: expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions) Convergent thinking: narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. Robert sternberg and his colleagues propose five ingredients of creativity.