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Compiled notes of required textbook readings chapter 8-10, 12-16
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Introduction to psychology 1
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UIUC Psych 100 Textbook Notes
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Chapter 8: Thinking, Reasoning, and LanguageThinking: Any mental activity or processing of info, including learning, remembering, perceiving,
communicating, believing, and deciding. These are all aspects of cognition.
- Our minds use a variety of mental shortcuts to increase our thinking efficiency, our mind
goes beyond available information and makes inferences from environmental inputs
- Mental Capacity: very complex, we often take thought for granted as we are consistent
doing it without thinking.
Cognitive Economy: Allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep the info we need for
decision making to a manageable minimum (aka “fast and frugal” thinking). However, it may
lead us to oversimplify → faulty conclusion (cognitive miser invests as little mental energy as
possible unless it’s necessary to do so).
- Our minds use heuristics/mental shortcuts to increase our thinking efficiency.
*inferences, may also be used for survival, these mental shortcuts allow us to draw
conclusions about people (dorm room study)
- Fast and frugal thinking according to Gerd Gigerenzer
- Reduces out mental energy spent (snap judgements)
Thin Slicing: Ability to extract useful info from small bits of behaviour *Ambady and Rosenthal
Heuristics and Biases
● Cognitive Bias: Systematic error in thinking, based on perceptions and ones idea of the
world (affects behaviour)
○ Cognition: the mental action/process of acquiring knowledge and understandings
through thought, experiences, and our senses
● Behaviourists View: they believe that mental activity is due to stimulus, response,
reinforcements, and punishments. *they cannot explain “filling in”
● Representative Heuristic: Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by
its superficial similarity to a prototype / based on how prevalent that event has been in
past experience *stereotypes (type of cognitive bias)
○ Our past experiences affect how we judge or react in certain ways
○ i.e. If I’m at the dog park and I see a tiny dog coming toward my dog I might start
worrying that the tiny dog will be a jerk because I’ve had lots of tiny dogs try and
bite or fight my dog. In my mind, tiny dogs are most likely to be jerks. I could be
, wrong, and this new tiny dog could be well behaved but the representativeness
heuristic leads me to have an expectation of a certain behaviour.
● Base Rate: How common a characteristic or behaviour is in the general population
○ We need to consider not only how similar that person is to other members of the
category, but also how prevalent that category is overall (type of cognitive bias)
○ I.e. we assume that all arts majors are able to paint
○ Base Rate Neglect: We often ignore basic info about how common something
really is in favour of info about our personal experiences or other info that stands
out to us (overestimate how dangerous it is to fly on an airplane and
underestimate how dangerous it is to ride in a car)
● Availability Heuristic: Heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence
based on the ease with which is come to our minds (type of cognitive bias) this uses
memory as well as mental images
○ i.e. It’s easier to think of words that start with the letter k than words that have a k
as the third letter (even though there are many more words with k as the third
letter in English) because of the availability bias
○ Ex. i don't want to move to another city because my friend said she hated it there
● Bandwagon Effect: Assume that a claim is correct just b/c many people believe it. Useful
in thinking processing b/s it saves us cognitive effort
○ Ex. Nursing majors are the most stressed out people (said by nursing majors)
● Hindsight Bias: Our tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted
something after it has already occured **I knew all along** (type of cognitive bias)
○ Compensation by scientific method (hypothesis), but it can have consequence for
our real-world decision making
○ Ex. i knew a global pandemic was coming before covid hit
● Confirmation Bias: Tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypothesis and
deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that contradicts (“i am always right” idea) (type of
cognitive bias)
● Top Down Processing: We fill in the gaps of missing info using our experience and
background knowledge which helps us to simplify our cognitive function. This would be
like ordering a dish because you like it as a whole and not just the ingredients.
*chunking: memory that relies on out ability to organize information into larger units
expanding the span and detail of our memory.
, ○ Concepts: Our knowledge and ideas about a set of objects, actions, and
characteristics that share core properties (what is the color purple?)
■ The fact that we have concepts that carry prior knowledge and experience
with them is what enables us to be economical in our thinking, we don’t
have to start from scratch every time we encounter a new object, event,
or situation.
○ Schema: Concepts we’ve stored in memory about how certain actions, objects,
and ideas relate to each other (helps us mentally organize events, enables us to
draw on our knowledge when we encounter something new). *the way and order
you order drinks and food at any restaurant
○ Linguistic Determinism: View that all thought is represented verbally, and that,
as a result, our language defines our thinking (not accurate because thought
occurs before speech)
■ Extreme version of top-down processing in which no ideas can be
generated without linguistic knowledge
■ This was disproved by conducting research with children and using
neuroimagery
○ Linguistic Relativity: View that characteristics of language shape our thought
processes (less extreme, more accurate) this explains that language cues the
recall of memories *Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
○ Language shapes some but not all aspects of perception, thought, and memory
● Top Down Processing: our brain processes only the information it receives, and
constructs meaning from it slowly and surely by building up understanding through
experience.
○ This would be like ordering a dish at a restaurant because you like the
ingredients and maybe have never tired the dish as a whole
Decision Making and Problem Solving
Decision Making: The process of selecting among a set of possible alternatives. It is better to
have only a few things to choose from, and then being able to make clear comparisons; usually
feels better to us. Decision making and problem solving are referred to as higher order thinking
, because they are the most effortful and difficult. This uses and integrates all basic aspects of
cognition (perception, knowledge, memory, language, and reasoning)
● System 1 Thinking: Rapid and intuitive (whether to order a salad or fries) *below
conscious awareness *better in real life situations *small decisions
● System 2 Thinking: Slow and analytical (whether to get married) *better in scientific
claims
● Framing: The way a questions is formulated that can influence the decisions people
make (you may be giving the correct information but the way you word things, one thing
might sound appealing one way and not appealing another way) *think about how
probability question are worded to seem more appealing one way
● Paralysis by analysis: we become overwhelmed by excessive information or spend too
much time weighing the pros and cons.
● Neuroeconomics: study of how the brian works when making financial decisions.
Decision making area is activated along with areas of the brain that process awards and
options.
Problem Solving: Generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal
● Algorithms: Step-by-step procedures that we apply to situations we know, and to new
situations that we have learned. Allows us to do things in an order that is most
advantageous, and usually results in a good outcome. Learned through trial and error, or
we could have learned them b/c someone else taught us a procedure. (ex. Driving
different models of cars)
○ People also tend to break problems into subproblems that are easier to solve.
Analogies can also be used to compare two things in order to solve a problem.
● Obstacles to Problem Solving:
○ Salience of Surface Similarities: Refers to how attention-grabbing something is.
Tends to focus attention on surface level properties of a problem. Ignoring The
surface features of a problem and focusing on underlying reasoning we needed
to solve it can be challenging
■ Ex. in math you are given two questions one involving a truck and the
other a train. These are the surface level properties where asking if the
question is addition or subtraction is the underlying reasoning.
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