Chapter 4 Quiz: Cognitive Biases and Psychological Vulnerabilities
1. Tariq Hassan's observation that he reads confirming news quickly and shares it, while reading disconfirming news slowly and looking for flaws, is a description of:
- A) The availability heuristic
- B) Confirmation bias
- C) In-group favoritism
- D) The backfire effect
2. The availability heuristic refers to the tendency to:
- A) Seek information from the most easily accessible sources
- B) Estimate likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind
- C) Prefer simple explanations over complex ones
- D) Rely on expert opinion when personal information is unavailable
3. A political campaign repeatedly uses a specific false statistic until audiences begin treating it as true. Which combination of cognitive mechanisms best explains this effect?
- A) Confirmation bias and in-group favoritism
- B) Anchoring and the Dunning-Kruger effect
- C) The illusory truth effect (mere exposure) and anchoring
- D) Negativity bias and false consensus
4. Henri Tajfel's "minimal group paradigm" studies found that:
- A) Group favoritism only appears when groups have a history of conflict
- B) In-group favoritism requires shared ethnic, national, or religious identity
- C) Even arbitrary group assignment produces in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination
- D) Group identity effects are limited to cultures with strong collectivist norms
5. The "bias blind spot," documented by Emily Pronin, refers to:
- A) The specific cognitive bias in which people cannot see propaganda in their own media environment
- B) The tendency to recognize biases in others more readily than in oneself
- C) A visual processing phenomenon affecting how people read biased text
- D) The failure to notice when one's own arguments contain logical fallacies
6. According to the current research consensus on the "backfire effect," corrections of false beliefs generally:
- A) Actively increase belief in the false claim among people who hold it strongly
- B) Have no effect on belief in false claims
- C) Modestly reduce belief in false claims, but do not backfire
- D) Are effective only when delivered by in-group members
7. Negativity bias refers to the finding that:
- A) People prefer negative news over positive news
- B) Negative events, emotions, and information carry more psychological weight than equivalent positive ones
- C) Propaganda is more effective when it uses negative language
- D) People's memories are systematically biased toward recalling negative experiences
8. A piece of content says: "You're one of the few people who really see through what the mainstream media is hiding." Which cognitive bias does this most directly exploit?
- A) Confirmation bias
- B) Illusory superiority / the "above average" effect
- C) In-group favoritism
- D) Anchoring
9. The Dunning-Kruger effect most specifically predicts propaganda vulnerability in domains where:
- A) Audiences have high knowledge and therefore high confidence
- B) Audiences have low knowledge but overestimate their competence
- C) Audiences have no opinion and defer to authority
- D) Audiences are motivated to seek out accurate information
10. Social media algorithms that optimize for engagement systematically amplify which cognitive bias by delivering content that generates more likes and shares?
- A) The anchoring effect
- B) The Dunning-Kruger effect
- C) Confirmation bias — confirming content generates more engagement than challenging content
- D) The availability heuristic — algorithms select for recent rather than accurate content