The availability heuristic leads people to make decisions based on how available information is inside their brains. After recently watching shark-attack programs, this readily available information influenced John's judgments of the likelihood of shark attacks.

The sunk-cost fallacy is the idea that one must go through with something or continue one's investment even if it is hopeless or detrimental to oneself. This occurs when one has invested money or time in something and feels obligated to continue to use resources on it. In this case, the man has already paid money for the ticket; therefore, he feels that he must attend the game even though he will be miserable. If he rationally thought about it, he is paying money to be miserable in the rain when he could just be relaxing at home, since the money is already gone.

A heuristic is a general rule based on our experience that we use to judge and make decisions. More commonly referred to as "rule of thumb", they are rules that very broadly apply that we've used and have worked in the past.  Sometimes our heuristics can be biased and thus lead to irrational decision-making. 

They are not "idiosyncratic" because heuristics tend be general and lend themselves to many different situations. Heuristics are not only inspired by hate, but are adopted based off of many situations. And although heuristics may be used to evaluate other people, this is not exclusive, and more often than not they are used to evaluate situations, problems, and decisions.

Divergent thinking is when one thinks of new solutions to problems. It's how people innovate and address recurring issues with new solutions that may actually fix the problem. It is not stereotypical, sadistic, or emotional, and rather engages the creative thinking processes. An example of divergent thinking would be the development of electric cars in response to the air pollution problems.

An example of the mere-exposure effect would be if someone initially hates coffee but is exposed to it and begins to like it. The mere-exposure effect happens when we may not like something upon first glance, but as we become more and more exposed to it then we come to like it more.

Overconfidence, with respect to thinking and cognition, refers to when one is unreasonably confident that their beliefs and opinions are correct. In other words, these individuals tend to think that they know more about the world than they actually do. This is not considered the same as "overconfident," which implies that someone is being egotistical.

When humans are actively engaged in mental cognition, we use concepts, prototypes, and cognitive schemas. These are essentially ways that we organize and average out large bodies of data about the world to reduce mental taxation or data overload. Emotional memory is not engaged because we are using our prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for intellectual thought.

A "cognitive schema" is a collection of knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, associations, and expectations about aspects of the world we are not familiar with. When we are heavily familiarized with something, we may not need a cognitive schema to process it. If we are thinking about an aspect of the world we are foreign to we may need the assistance of a cognitive schema. For instance, we might form a cognitive schema around New York based off of what we've read, seen, heard, etc. Then when we actually go to New York, we might end up using this cognitive schema to filter the information they're receiving.

Lev Vygotsky posited that children’s sociocultural environment plays a huge role in how they develop cognitively as well as their acquisition of language. Unlike Piaget's view, Vygotsky did not believe children went through series of stages in their linguistic and cognitive development. Their development depends on interactions with adults, cultural norms, and their environmental circumstances. He also pointed out that children use language to control their own behavior.

Cognition is a form of thinking that involves mental activities such as understanding, problem solving, and decision making. This is when we are fully engaged with our minds, using our full mental capacity to innovate, weigh options, and tease out problems. Cognition, through its inherently innovative nature, makes creativity possible.