C - Judgement and decision making

Question 1

Judgement vs decision making

Answer 1

Judgement: deciding on the likelihood of various events using incomplete info (evaluation of accuracy).

Decision making: selecting one option from several possibilities (evaluation of consequences).

Question 2

What are base rates?

Answer 2

Base rate: relative frequency of an event within a given population (can improve accuracy of judgements)

Initial beliefs are modified by new info, which increases / decreases the strength of our beliefs

We need to evaluate the relative probability of two hypotheses before data are obtained

Question 3

Heuristics

Answer 3

Representativeness heuristic
- Deciding an object / person belongs to a category because s/he appears representative of that category
- People often ignore base rate (farmers) info by relying on the representativeness heuristic Kahneman & Tversky (1973)

Conjunction Fallacy
- Mistaken belief that a combination of two events is more likely than one event on its own Tversky & Kahneman (1983)
- Involves representativeness heuristic
- Misinterpretation? Has proven difficult to explain

Availability Heuristic
refers to the frequencies with which events can be estimated on the basis of how easy / difficult it is to retrieve them from memory

Question 4

Theories of judgement

Answer 4

• Support theory
• Fast and frugal heuristics
• Natural frequency hypothesis
• Dual-process theory