Chapter 7~Cognitive Psychology~ Information processing

Amber 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 likely if 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 ways DECISION 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:1. Population growth2. Global warming3. Persistent organic pollutants4. Pesticides, hazardous waste, and radiation