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1. What Are Heuristics?
What Are Heuristics? Video Transcript Example: Salesperson It is late afternoon. You are home, and someone rings the doorbell. You…
2. Modes of Processing / Dual Processing
An important theoretical cognitive construct pertinent to understanding heuristics in social situations is mode of processing. What Are Modes of…
3. Memory
What Is Memory? Colloquially, when talking about memory, we usually refer to episodic memory. Episodic memory includes memories of specific…
4. Mental Representations
In the previous topic (3. Memory), we mentioned “knowledge representation”. What IS that? What Are Mental Representations? Mental representations are…
5. The Availability & Representativeness Heuristics
The two most ubiquitous heuristics are the availability and the representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). What Is the Availability…
6. Dig Deeper
Individuation Versus Stereotyping Something else worth pointing out — and you may have noticed it already — is that someone…
7. The Availability & Representativeness Heuristics: Conclusion
At this point, you should have a solid understanding of: They are not good or bad in themselves. Instead, they…
8. The Anchoring Heuristic (a.k.a. Anchor & Adjust Heuristic)
One last heuristic to introduce, which is rarely confused with availability or representativeness but actually has a similar underlying cognitive…
9. Let’s Practice Identifying & Applying These Three Heuristics
Practice Scenario & Questions Example: Hiring committee You are sitting on a hiring committee for a leadership position in a…
10. What Are Cognitive Biases?
By now, you have a solid understanding of heuristics, including: Now, let’s talk about a related but distinct concept: cognitive…
11. Confirmation Bias
What Is Confirmation Bias? Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and attend to information that affirms one’s pre-existing beliefs…
12. Status Quo Bias
What Is Status Quo Bias? The status quo bias refers to people’s preference for decisions and behaviours that preserve the current state…
13. Loss Aversion
What Is Loss Aversion? Loss aversion is the tendency for people to perceive potential losses as more significant or consequential than potential…
14. Risk Aversion
A related concept to loss aversion is risk aversion. What Is Risk Aversion? Risk aversion is our preference for more…
15. In-Group Bias
What Is In-Group Bias? In-group bias is people’s tendency to favour members of their own social group over non-members. This…
16. Just World Hypothesis
What Is the Just World Hypothesis? People perceive social situations and make attributions based on the notion that everyone gets…
17. Time to Practice!
Video Transcripts Consider the short clips below. Analyze each one in terms of heuristic processing, cognitive biases, and their outcomes…
References Cited
Bargh, J. A. (2006). What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious…
Additional References
Banaji, M.R., & Hardin, C.D. (1996). Automatic Stereotyping. Psychological Science, 7(3), 136–141. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00346.x. Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A…
