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Pollyanna Principle
The Pollyanna principle (also called Pollyannaism or positivity bias) is the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones. Research indicates that at the subconscious level, the mind tends to focus on the optimistic; while at the conscious level, it tends to focus on the negative. This subconscious bias is similar to the Barnum effect. Development The name derives from the 1913 novel ''Pollyanna'' by Eleanor H. Porter describing a girl who plays the "glad game"—trying to find something to be glad about in every situation. The novel has been adapted to film several times, most famously in 1920 and 1960. An early use of the name "Pollyanna" in psychological literature was in 1969 by Boucher and Osgood who described a ''Pollyanna hypothesis'' as a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently and diversely than negative words in communicating. Empirical evidence for this tendency has been provided by computational analyses of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barnum Effect
The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect or, less commonly, the Barnum–Forer effect, is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some paranormal beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, aura reading, and some types of personality tests. These characterizations are often used by practitioners as a con-technique to convince victims that they are endowed with a paranormal gift. Because the assessment statements are so vague, people ascribe their own interpretation, thus the statement becomes "personal" to them. Also, individuals are more likely to accept negative assessments of themselves if they perceive the person presenting the assessment as a high-status professiona ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills. Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects: # ''attitude polarization'' (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence) # ''belief perseverance'' (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false) # the ''irr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Biases
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Although it may seem like such misperceptions would be aberrations, biases can help humans find commonalities and shortcuts to assist in the navigation of common situations in life. Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics. Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, resulting ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wishful Thinking
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing. Some psychologists believe that positive thinking is able to positively influence behavior and so bring about better results. This is called the "Pygmalion effect". Christopher Booker described wishful thinking in terms of :"the fantasy cycle" ... a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history—and in storytelling. When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-serving Bias
A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more credit for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their self-esteem from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem. For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade on an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher's poor teaching ability or unfair test questions might be exhibiting the self-serving bias. Studies have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-deception
Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth) so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception. Brief history While Freudian analysis of the conscious and the unconscious minds dominated the field, psychological scientists in the 1970s became curious about how those two seemingly separate worlds could work together. The lack of mechanistic models available to this line of research, led to the debate being unresolved. Later, the focus has been shifted to vision-related research in social psychology. Theorization Analysis The traditional paradigm of self-deception is modeled after ''interpersonal'' deception, where ''A'' intentionally gets ''B'' to believe some proposition ''p'', all the while knowing or believing truly ¬''p'' (not ''p''). Such deception is intentional and requires the decei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scotomization
Scotomization is a psychological term for the mental blocking of unwanted perceptions, analogous to the visual blindness of an actual scotoma. Controversies Reviving in the 1920s a term initially used by Charcot in connection with hysteria, the French analysts Rene Laforgue and Edouard Pinchon introduced the idea of scotomization into psychoanalysis – a move initially welcomed by Freud in 1926 as a useful description of the hysterical avoidance of distressing perceptions. The following year, however, he attacked the term for suggesting that the perception was wholly blotted out (as with a retina's blind spot), whereas his clinical experience showed that on the contrary intense psychic measures had to be taken to keep the unwanted perception out of consciousness. A debate followed between Freud and Laforgue, further illuminated by Pinchon's 1928 article on 'The Psychological Significance of Negation in French', where he argued that "The French language expresses the desir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reality Principle
In Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis, the reality principle (german: Realitätsprinzip) is the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly, as opposed to acting on the pleasure principle. Allowing the individual to defer (put off) instant gratification, the reality principle is the governing principle of the actions taken by the ego, after its slow development from a "pleasure-ego" into a "reality-ego": it may be compared to the triumph of reason over passion, head over heart, rational over emotional mind, human values over animal instinct. History Freud argued that “an ego thus educated has become ‘reasonable’; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also, at bottom, seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished”. In his introductory lectures of 1915, at t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Positivity Offset
In psychology, the positivity offset is a phenomenon where people tend to interpret neutral situations as mildly positive, and rate their lives as good, most of the time. The positivity offset stands in notable asymmetry to the negativity bias. Similarities and differences to Negativity Bias Two studies were presented within a single study that looked at the difference between positivity offset and negative bias to see if it is good or bad for some people. The first study measured an individual’s reactions to different stimuli such as pictures, sounds, and words. The results from this study have also seen evidence, in comparison to other studies, that the positivity offset is in favor of positive stimuli over negative stimuli. The opposite effect is true for negative bias. An interesting observation that was made in this study was that positivity offset and negative bias was predicted in different behaviors rather than from established measures focused on personality. The second ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overconfidence Effect
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective ''confidence'' in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective ''accuracy'' of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfidence is one example of a miscalibration of subjective probabilities. Throughout the research literature, overconfidence has been defined in three distinct ways: (1) ''overestimation'' of one's actual performance; (2) ''overplacement'' of one's performance relative to others; and (3) ''overprecision'' in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs. The most common way in which overconfidence has been studied is by asking people how confident they are of specific beliefs they hold or answers they provide. The data show that confidence systematically exceeds accuracy, implying people are more sure that they are correct than they deserve to be. If human confidence had perfect calibration, judgments with 100% confide ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optimism Bias
Optimism bias (or the optimistic bias) is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. Optimism bias is common and transcends gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age.O’Sullivan, Owen P. (2015)The neural basis of always looking on the bright side.''Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences'', 8(1):11–15. Optimistic biases are even reported in non-human animals such as rats and birds. However, autistic people are less susceptible to optimistic biases. Four factors can cause a person to be optimistically biased: their desired end state, their cognitive mechanisms, the information they have about themselves versus others, and overall mood. The optimistic bias is seen in a number of situations. For example: people believing that they are less at risk of being a crime victim, smokers believing that they are less likely to contract lung can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Negativity Bias
The negativity bias,Kanouse, D. E., & Hanson, L. (1972). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, S. Valins, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, & B. Weiner (Eds.), ''Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior.'' Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations. Explanations Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
