Margaret is passionately committed to animal rights. At an evening lecture required for her biology class, she learned that the title of the speaker's talk was "The Importance of Animal Experimentation to Medical Advances." Offended and sure that the speaker had nothing ethical or interesting to say, Margaret ignored everything the speaker said and spent the whole lecture sending outraged tweets to other animal activists. According to your textbook, the primary cause of Margaret's poor listening was?

In psychology, jumping to conclusions is a form of distortion in cognitive understanding. It occurs when a person creates predetermined opinion or conclusion or negative assumption though it may not be a fact all the time about someone's speech or writing. Margaret, in this case, has jumped to conclusions by assuming that the speaker is not likely to enlighten with something interesting or ethical. Such situation occurs when the listeners, like Margaret, have prior experience of listening to a particular person, or his presentation style.