Chapter 13 - Decision Making Flashcards
Judgement
the ability to make considered decisions
Reasoning
the process of drawing conclusions
Decision
the process of choosing between alternatives
Inductive Reasoning
process of drawing general conclusions based on specific observations and evidence - conclusions reached are PROBABLY TRUE (NOT THE ARISTOTLE ONE - deductive)
Factors of Inductive Arguement
Representativeness of observations: How well do the observations about a particular category represent all of the members of that category? (ex. the crows all black example suffers from a lack of representativeness because it does not consider crows from other parts of the country or the world)
Number of Observations: The argument about the crows is made stronger by adding the Washington, DC, observations to the Pittsburgh observations. However, further research reveals that the hooded crow, found in Europe, is gray with black wings and tail, and the home crow, from Asia, is gray and black. So it turns out that the conclusion “All crows are black” is not true. In contrast, the conclusion about the sun rising in Tucson is extremely strong because it is supported by a very large number of observations.
Quality of the Evidence: Stronger evidence results in stronger conclusions. For example, although the conclusion “The sun will rise in Tucson” is extremely strong because of the number of observations, it becomes even stronger when we consider scientific descriptions of how the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around
the sun. Thus, adding the observation “Scientific measurements of the rotation of the earth indicate that every time the earth rotates the sun will appear to rise” strengthens the conclusion even further.
Heuristics
“rules of thumb” that are likely to provide the correct answer to a problem but are not foolproof
Availability Heurisitics
events that more easily come to mind are judged as being more probable than events that are less easily recalled
Illusory correlations
occur when a relation- ship between two events appears to exist, but in reality, there is no relationship or the relationship is much weaker than it is assumed to be. Ex. if an individual has a bad experience with a lawyer and they immediately assume all lawyers are bad people
CAN CREATE STEREOTYPES
Representativeness Heuristic
the likelihood that an instance is a member of a larger category depends on how well that instance resembles properties we typically associate with that category
Base Rate
the relative proportion of different classes in the population
ex. In 1972, when this experiment was carried out, there were many more male farmers than male librarians in the United States, so if Robert was randomly chosen from the population, it is much more likely that he was a farmer.
when only base rate information is available, people use that information to make their estimates. However, when any descriptive information is also available, people disregard the available base rate information, and this can potentially lead to errors in reasoning. Note, however, that the right kind of descriptive information can increase the accuracy of a judgment
Conjunction Rule
that the probability of a conjunction of two events (A and B) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents (A alone or B alone)
ex. Because feminist bank tellers are a subset of bank tellers, it is always more likely that someone is a bank teller than a feminist bank teller.
Law of Large Numbers
the larger the number of individuals that are randomly drawn from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire population
Myside Bias
Charles Lord
a common type of cognitive bias where people process information in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes
ex. selecting news sources that agree with one’s political affiliation, while ignoring any opposing arguments from other sources
Confirmation Bias
when people look for information that conforms to their hypothesis and ignore information that refutes it
Backfire effect
Person’s support for a particular viewpoint becomes stronger when presented with facts opposing their viewpoint. Person holds to their beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence.
ex. Climate change denial: Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the reality of climate change, some individuals continue to reject this evidence and deny the existence of climate change.
