Judgment/ inferences made with very little information about a person or situation

e.g. In Janine Willis and Alex Todorov (2006), p's  a large number fo faces and had them rate how attractive, aggressive, likable, trustworthy and competent each person seemes; some participants were given as much time as they wnted to make each rating and their estimates were used as the standard of comparison, as the msot confident impressions an individual could form based solely on photographs; others made same rating, but after seeing each face for only a second, half a second or a tenth of a second The hurried judgments corresponded well with the more reflective assessments

Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are  acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences--actions that reinforce the erroneous gropu norm

e.g. feeling a professor is going too fast and thinking everyone else understands and so not raising hand

transmitters of information often have an ideological agenda; a desire to foster certain beliefs or behviors in other that leads them to accentuate some elesments ofa story and suppress others 

e..g. when prepping Harry Truman for his 1947 aspeech on the containment of the Societ Union, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that it was necessary to be "clearer than the truth."

e.g. Republicans trumpet all manner of mileading statistics to make the Democrats look bad and the Democrats do likewise to the Republicans 

e..g iIn areas of intense ethnic strife, suchas Kashmir, Congo and Gaza, all sides wildly exaggerate their own righteousness and inflate tales of atrocities committed against them (even though the reality is bad enough).

Studies have consistently found a positive correlation between the amount of time spent watching television and teh fear of victimization; applies only for people who live in dangerous areas.  The desire to entertain is one of the most pervasive reasons for distortion ins secondhand acoounts. On a small scale, this happens in the stories people tell one another, someimes exaggerationg to make them more interestng. On a larger scale, the desire to entertain distorts the messges people receive through the mass media

We are more attentive to negative information than to positive information.

e.g. You have just delivered a speech, you get many positive comments but one bad one " your intro lacked a punch", you are likelier to focus on that ONE negative comment

How information is framed has a powerful influence on the reponses it elicits.

e.g. Because negative information typically has greater impact, people tend to pay more to restore what was lost than to bring about th same benefit anew 

The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it

e.g. when evaluation a proposition like hispanics plae a high value on family life, a plan needs frequent watering,, people more readily, reliably and vigorously seek out evidence that would support the proposition rather than information that would contradict the proposition

Sometimes, people deliberately search for evidence that confirms their preferences or expectations

e.g. someone who wants a given propostition to be true may energetically sift through the pertinent evidence in an effort to uncover information that confirms its validity. 

we are most likely to remember those stimuli that have most captured our attention; enfluence of schemas on memory is also importatnt for judgment because, after all, many judgments are not made immediately, they are made later and based on information retrieeved form memory.

e.g. students who thought the women was a librarian recalled librarian- consistent information more accurately than waitress-inconsistent information

the process whereby judgments of likelihood are base don assessments of similarility between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect.

e.g. Ted Bundy  and Scott Peterson were clean-cut educated professionals, characteristics that are not prototypes of a murderer, people were surprised

The feeling of ease (hard/difficult) associated with processing information

e.g. we judge fluent mnames to be more famous, fluent objects to be more prototypical members of their categories 

e.g. when font of a recipe is hard to read, people estimate it will be harder to cook

Information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in the population

e.g. an irregular word "imbroglio" is hard to process; a clear image is easy to process

The tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project

e.g. me studying for the Psych 160 midterm a couple of days before the exam

e.g. People of Sydney planned to open their iconic opera house in 1963 and that it would cost $7 million, they opened it in 1973 at a cost of $102 million

The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not

e.g. big or small eyes with paranoia