Psychology and Sociology
40 flashcards
~20 min
Psychological Defense Mechanisms and Cognitive Biases
Understand how the mind protects itself and how it makes mistakes with this 40-card deck. It covers Freudian defense mechanisms such as repression, projection, and displacement, along with common cognitive biases and heuristics like confirmation bias, anchorin...
About this deck
Understand how the mind protects itself and how it makes mistakes with this 40-card deck. It covers Freudian defense mechanisms such as repression, projection, and displacement, along with common cognitive biases and heuristics like confirmation bias, anchoring, and the Dunning-Kruger effect. The deck suits psychology students, exam candidates, and anyone curious about everyday thinking and behavior.
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An unconscious psychological strategy the mind uses to reduce anxiety and protect the self from threatening thoughts or feelings.
Sigmund Freud. His daughter Anna Freud expanded it in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936).
The ego, which mediates between the id, the superego, and reality.
Unconsciously pushing painful or threatening thoughts and memories out of awareness.
Refusing to accept reality or facts because they are too painful to face.
Attributing your own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to someone else.
Redirecting an emotion, such as anger, from its real source to a safer target.
Explaining an unacceptable behavior or outcome with logical-sounding but false reasons.
Acting in a way that is the opposite of your true, unacceptable feelings.
Returning to an earlier, more childlike stage of behavior when under stress.
Channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable activities, such as sport or art.
Dealing with stress by focusing on facts and logic while avoiding the emotions.
Consciously choosing to push unwanted thoughts out of mind.
Reducing anxiety by adopting the traits or behaviors of a person or group seen as powerful or admired.
Making up for a perceived weakness by excelling in another area.
Trying to cancel out an unacceptable action or thought through a symbolic act of correction.
Separating an emotion from the memory or event that caused it.
Seeing people or situations as all good or all bad, with no middle ground.
A systematic pattern of deviation from rational judgment, caused by mental shortcuts and beliefs.
A mental shortcut that allows quick decisions but can lead to errors.
Seeking, interpreting, and remembering information in ways that support your existing beliefs.
Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions.
Judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind.
The tendency to believe, after an event, that you "knew it all along."
The tendency of people with low skill in an area to overestimate their ability.
Overemphasizing personal traits and underestimating situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
Crediting successes to yourself and blaming failures on external factors.
Explaining your own behavior by the situation, but others' behavior by their personality.
Adopting beliefs or behaviors because many other people do.
Continuing an endeavor because of the time, money, or effort already invested, even when it no longer makes sense.
Letting one positive trait influence your overall impression of a person.
Making different decisions depending on how the same information is presented.
Overestimating the accuracy of your own knowledge, judgments, or abilities.
Believing that past random events affect the probability of future ones, such as expecting heads after a run of tails.
Judging probability by how closely something resembles a typical example, while ignoring base rates.
Believing you are less likely than others to experience negative events.
A preference for keeping things as they are, even when change would be beneficial.
Giving more weight to negative experiences and information than to positive ones.
The tendency to feel losses more strongly than equivalent gains, a concept developed by Kahneman and Tversky.
The mental discomfort from holding conflicting beliefs or behaviors, described by Leon Festinger in 1957.