Chapter 8

• Cognition - thinking and using knowledge

  • Begins with attending to something and categorizing what something is

  Cognitive Psychologists deal with how people organize their thoughts into language
• Choice Blindness - when people are blind due to their choices


  Ask if A or B are more attractive, switch A and B at some point, don't realize their choice was switched
• Preattentive Process - stands out immediately


  Attentive Process - one that requires searching through the items in series
• Change Blindness - failure to detect changes in parts of a scene
• Daniel Kahnerman:

  Type 1 Thinking

  • quick, automatic processes (familiar faces and routines)
  • saves time and energy


  Type 2 Thinking

  • mathematical calculations, evaluating evidence
  • anything that requires attention
  • relies on working memory
  • if working memory is already loaded then it falls back to Type 1
• Representativeness Heuristic - stereotyping

  • If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's probably a duck

  Availability Heuristic - if we can easily think of categories then they must be common

  • Taking a category of one period and stretching across a larger group
  • Just because it rained every Friday one January does not mean it rains every Friday every January