Psych Final

• Framing


  the way that info is presented shapes what we choose
• Behavioral economics


  The effect of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural, and social factors on decision-making (previously believed that rational behavior prevails - incorrect)
• Loss Aversion


  The tendency to prefer avoiding loss to acquiring equivalent gains
• Endowment effect


  a form of loss aversion, you're more averse to losing something once you have it than you are excited to gain same thing before you have it
• Sunk Cost Effect


  your willingness to choose something you wouldn't otherwise choose to do because of money or effort already spent
• Sunk Cost


  a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered
• Anchoring 


  When a judgement is affected by the results of a previous estimate, even though both judgements were intended to have been made independently
• Availability heuristic


  when we make judgments based on the info most readily available to us. eg. How do people die: homicide vs. suicide
• Heuristic


  An approach to problem-solving that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational - but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate approximation
• Affect heuristic/emotional reasoning


  a tendency to use the affect (i.e. emotion) we associate with the objects and events in the world to make judgments and decisions about the "best" choice
• emotional reasoning


  when we use disgust to determine morality (plays into cancel culture)
• Paradox of choice


  we are less happy with choices made from more options than we are with choices made from few options
• weapon focus


  when the central important details (like a gun) are encoded and remembered, but surrounding peripheral information (such as the color of the man's shirt) are not
• Eyewitness memory errors

  • ~75,000 criminal trials per year = decided on the basis of eyewitness testimony
  • 90% of reversed convictions originally involved mistaken eyewitness identification
• can fMRI distinguish false memories?

  Yes, hippocampus shows same activity for true memories and false memories, but parahippocampal gyrus shows different activities
• transience


  the (quick) weakening or loss of memory over time
• How do we fight transience?

  the spacing effect, the testing effect, context-dependent learning/memory, elaboration, and emotional arousal
• the spacing effect


  spacing your learning out helps you remember content
• the testing effect


  testing yourself on content helps you remember it
• context-dependent learning/memory


  we recall best if memory retrieval occurs in the same context in which the info was encoded
• elaboration


  processing material in a more in-depth way; adding meaning and associations to it to remember it better (deep encoding)
• emotional arousal


  we have stronger memory encoding for emotionally-charged info
• Flashbulb memories


  extremely vivid memories for emotionally significant, as if the moment were caught in time like a photograph (we tend to be confident in their accuracy, but what's interesting about them is they're often not accurate)
• Primacy effect


  we have a better memory for the first items/events that occur
• recency effect


  we have a better memory for the last items/events that occur
• suggestibility


  we incorporate misinformation into memory as a result of questions, comments, or suggestions when we try to call up a past experience
• Explicit memories


  memories that require intentional and conscious recollection
• episodic memory


  memory that involves the recollection of personal experience
• semantic memory


  memory that includes concepts and facts that you "know" about the world
• implicit memories


  memories that occur without intentional recollection
• conditioned memory


  which we learn, often without effort or awareness, to associate neutral stimuli with another stimulus
• procedural memory


  memory for how to do something
• primed memory


  when previous exposure to a stimulus changes a person's response to that stimulus when it's presented again, even though they cannot explicitly recall the first exposure
• H.M.


  he had his hippocampus removed - in a lot of studies
• Anterograde amnesia


  inability to form new long-term memories
• retrograde amnesia


  inability to access memories that were formed previously
• OCD


  The "doubting disease" because we doubt our own memories
• PTSD


  We get exceptionally stuck on a single important memory. that memory is intrusive: flashbacks, nightmares
• Intelligence


  a combo of the theory that it is a general underlying ability across many tasks and that it is modular; there are different "kinds", each of which you can be uniquely good at
• Sternberg's Theory


  there are 3 kinds of intelligence: analytical, practical, and creative