Chapter 2 Psychology Vocab

Watching behavior in real-world settings (maximizes external validity, but limits perspective)

Research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, often over an extended time period (great for atypical situations and bad for one bad anecdotal conclusion)

Surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus

Mental shortcuts that help us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world

Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype

How common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population

Heuristic that involves overestimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds

Systematic errors in thinking

Tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions

Tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes

Extent to which we can generalize findings to real-world settings

Extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study

Demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated (correlations can be positive/negative, range from -1 to 1, and square the correlation for the percent)

Perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exist