01:830:101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 38: Confirmation Bias

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: 01:830:101
• Professor: Professor Marvasti

Document Summary

Confirmation bias: a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. Fixation: the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set. Mental set: a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past. Functional fixedness: the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving. Representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information. Availability heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common. Overconfidence: the tendency to be more confident than correct to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.