Chapter 9: Language and Thought

Question 1

Decision Making and the Brain

Answer 1

Pre Frontal Lobe damage

• people with this damage do not show emotional reactions during risky decision making
  
  • Insensitivity to future consequencs
  • Greater activation here in healthy individuals
  • Similar effects in substance-dependent individuals (addicted to cocaine)
  • do not show anticipatory SCR

Question 2

Theoretical Reasoning

Answer 2

reasoning directed toward arriving at a belief

Question 3

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Answer 3

People make decisions about a current situation based on what they have previously invested in the situation

• example: $100 spent on ticket to concert plus waiting in line.
  
  • unwilling to skip the concert even though it is cold and rainy outside and you will be miserable

Question 4

Belief-Laden Reasoning

Answer 4

topic in which we already ahve an opinion on

1. temporal lobe is activated

Question 5

Insight

Answer 5

• there are brain differences between decciding based on insight compared to deciding based on analytical thinking
• Frontal lobe is important, but there is also a flash of acitivity in the parietal lobe during insight
• people who have a more positive emotional state have a greater insight to figuring out problems

Question 6

Conjunction Fallacy

Answer 6

people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event

• Is she a bank teller or a bank teller and a women activist?
• If you are just worrying about one thing it is more accurate

Question 7

Frequency Format Hypothesis

Answer 7

Our minds evolved to notice how frequently things occur, NOT how likely they are to occur

• We make decisions inaccurately if there is more probability

Question 8

Reasoning

Answer 8

a mental activity that consists of organizing information or beliefs into a series of steps to reach conclusions

Question 9

Syllogistic Reasoning

Answer 9

whether a conclusion follows from two statements that we assume to be true

Question 10

Rational Choice Theory

Answer 10

We make decisions by determining how likely something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, and then multiiplying the two

• ex. Suppose you were asked to choose between a 10% chance of gaining $500 and a 20% chance of gaining $2000. The rational person would choose the second alternative because the expected payoff is $400 ($2000 x 20%), whereas the first offers an expected gain of only $50 ($500 x 10%). Selecting the option with the highest expected value seems so straightforward that many economists accepted the basic ideas in rational choice theory
• ex. good at estimating frequency (10 out of 1000), but not probability (1% of the popuation)

Question 11

Availability Bias

Answer 11

Items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently

• ex. the list of names, some of the women were famous, none of the men were, you might have thought there were more women’s names than men’s

Question 12

Belief Bias

Answer 12

people’s judgments about whether to accept conclusions depend more on how believable the conclusions are than on whether the arguments are logically valid

• less able to see flaws in conclusions if it is something that we already believe

Question 13

Frequency vs. Probability

Answer 13

people are good at estimating frequency, but not probability

• ex. the doctor example with the mamograms and the cancer risks

Question 14

Analogical Problem Solving

Answer 14

Solve a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and appying that solutino to the current problem

Question 15

Practical Reasoning

Answer 15

figuring out what to do, or reasoning directed toward action

• Means-ends analysis is one example
• ex. figuring out how to get to a concert across town if you don’t have a car
• We are better at this kind of reasoning

Question 16

Moral Thinking and Emotion

Answer 16

Bouncing back and forth between the frontal lobe and limbic system when the decision requires complex thought and not just emotion

• Anterior Cingulate
  
  • fairly quickly to an emotional decision that someone needs to make
  • helps make touch decisions
  • ex. emotion lit up when thought about pushing guy in front of train

Question 17

Belief-Neutral Reasoning

Answer 17

do not have any beliefs about the topic, just trying to figure out what to think about it

• Parietal lobe is activated

Question 18

Anticipatory SCR (skin conductance response)

Answer 18

begin to have a response just by thinking about an action without actually performing it

Question 19

Means-Ends Analysis

Answer 19

A process of searching for the means or steps to reduce the differences between the current situation and the desired

Question 20

Framing Effects

Answer 20

People give different answers to the same problem dpending on how the problem is phrased (or framed)

• 70% effectiveness rate sounds good
• 30% ineffectivenss rate sounds bad
• How it’s though about and presented to you

Question 21

Heuristics

Answer 21

fast and efficient strategies that may facilitate decision making but do not guarantee that a solution will be reached

• Mental shortcuts, or “rules of thumb”, that are often, but not always, effective when approaching a problem
• efficient way to organize info

Question 22

Prospect Theory

Answer 22

people choose to take on risk when evaluating potential losses and avoid risks when evaluating potential gains

• Certainty Effect
  
  • people simplify available information
• Expected Utility
  
  • People choose the prospect with the best value

Question 23

Algorithm

Answer 23

a well-defined sequence of procedures or rules that guarantees a solution to a problem

• ex. two approaches to constructing a PowerPoint presentation involving features you rarely use, such as inserting movies and complex animations: (1) You try to remember what you did the last time you tried to do a similar presentation; (2) you follow a set of step-by-step directions that you wrote down the last time you didsomething similar, which tells you exactly how to insert movies and build complex animations

Question 24

Representativeness Heuristic

Answer 24

A probability judgment by comparing an object or event to a prototype of the object or event

• People ignored the fact that there were more engineers interviewed than lawyers and said the third person could be either, when the probability was much higher for that of an engineer.

Question 25

Functional Fixedness

Answer 25

the tendency to perceive the functions of objects as fixed

• constricts our thinking
• Hard to think about things with an open mind
• ex. the nine dot problem
  
  • you have to allow the lines to extend to connected all the dots with only 4 straight lines