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Chapter 7. ~Cognitive Psychology~ Information processing Amber Gilewski Tompkins Cortland Community College. Cognitive Psychology: the study of mental processes
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Chapter 7 ~Cognitive Psychology~ Information processingAmber GilewskiTompkins Cortland Community College
Cognitive Psychology:the study of mental processes • Understanding the way people process information about environmental problems is crucial for understanding their responses to them • Cognitive and perceptual biases, errors, and shortcuts, cause us to overact to some hazards and under-react to others
Humans are visual-dependent • Sight uses a greater part of the human brain cortex • Leads people to rely heavily on visual information • Seeing is believing • Out of sight, out of mind • Visual dependency has been exploited by all sides of the environmental debates
Change blindness • Visual scenes can change radically without being noticed because of constraints on the ability to: • Process • Retain • Compare information, from one moment to the next PBS – Change Blindness
Irrelevant information • Too much information can produce GIGO (garbage in-garbage out) if the information is confusing • Many reasoning difficulties come from being distracted by or using irrelevant information Greenwashing • Inaccurate and irrelevant information is displayed in an attempt to make companies appear environmentally conscious Planet 100: Top 5 Eco-Contradictions
One way that people actively pursue irrelevant information: Confirmation bias - When testing hunches against incoming data, most people make the mistake of looking for confirming rather than disconfirming information
Representativeness heuristic: • The tendency to judge an event as likelyif it represents the typical features of its category • Availability heuristic: ----The tendency to form a judgment based on that which is readily brought to mind • Comparative optimism: • A cognitive bias that leads individuals to believe they are less vulnerable than other people • A heuristic that helps people feel good about themselves, in spite of their behavior or circumstances
False consensus: • A heuristic that helps people maintain positive self-esteem by convincing themselves that many others engage in the same undesirable behaviors that they do • False polarization: • The tendency to perceive the views of those on the opposing side of a partisan debate as more extreme than they really are • Framing effects: • Are induced when the same information is structured in different waysDECISION MAKING & HEURISTICS ACTIVITY
Rank in order the following hazards according to your perception of the health risk each poses: • Radiation • Persistent organic pollutants • Pesticides • Global warming • Hazardous waste sites • Population growth
Professional risk assessment: • Population growth • Global warming • Persistent organic pollutants • Pesticides, hazardous waste, and radiation