7: Judging Probabilities & Frequencies Flashcards
define: heuristic
mental shortcuts that allow people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently.
what are 3 examples of heuristics?
Availability
Representativeness
Anchoring
How does the availability heuristic influence probability judgement?
Can we easily bring to mind a similar situation
If YES= more likely to happen
If NO= less likely to happen
what are the practical problems with the availability heuristic?
If something is scary it’s more salient so you devote more time to thinking about it
Something is reported on widely but doesn’t happen to you (eg shark attacks)
How does fame influence frequency recall?
People judge that famous names are more frequent than non-famous names even when this is not the case
Define: conjunction fallacy
an inference that a conjoint set of two or more specific conclusions is likelier than any single member of that same set, in violation of the laws of probability.
_ _ _ _ i n g? VS _ _ _ _ _ n _?
what kind of heuristic is the conjunction fallacy?
availability
How does the representativeness heuristic influence probability judgement?
It causes base rate neglect/ gamblers fallacy, where people abandon the facts they know about a situation to favour their biases about how representative a situation is to the norm
define: anchoring
How a previous irrelevant piece of information affects later judgements
What is the famous study about anchoring?
Tversky and Kahneman (1974)
Is the percentage of African countries in the United Nations…more or less than 65%? OR More or less than 10%?
Best estimation of UN membership was influenced by anchor value
How do natural frequencies help us make accurate judgements
People are more accurate when they can say _out of _ than _%
What are misperceptions of randomness?
Where people abandon understanding of randomness to favour their biases for future outcomes
what is an example of a misperception of randomness?
gambler’s fallacy
what are 2 ecological rationales that effect probability predictions?
natural frequencies & misperceptions of randomness
What motivates misperceptions of randomness?
Inappropriate generalisation of past experiences: Random mechanical outcomes vs sampling without replacement
Memory Constraints: If you have 1000 repeats, everything is about equally probable, but we don’t hold that much information in our minds and we don’t encounter them in life
