The study of how people select, interpret, and use information to make judgments about the social world. A collection of related beliefs or ideas that people use to organize their knowledge about the social world. Predict the future. Can lead to distorted memory. The rational model suggests evenhanded data gathering.
People gather very little data.
The rational model suggests objective integration. Ambiguous cases are interpreted as confirming. Vivid cases carry more weight. The Availability Heuristic. The Representativeness Heuristic.