Psych 105 Midterm questions with correct answers

Thinking Definition - Answer any mental activity or processing of information, including learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding What is cognitive economy? - Answer The use of heuristics to reduce mental effort while still getting things right most of the time What are heuristics? - Answer Mental shortcuts, drawn from inferences, to increase thinking efficiency Can fast and frugal thinking be better than exhaustive analysis? - Answer Yes What is cognitive bias? - Answer systematic error in thinking What is a representative heuristic? - Answer Judging the probability of an event based on how prevalent the event has been in past experience, takes into account base rate information (how common a characteristic is in general society) What is an example of a representative heuristic? - Answer Stereotyping What is an availability heuristic? - Answer heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our mind What is hindsight bias? - Answer the tendency to overestimate one's ability to have predicted an event once the outcome is known