export_(GS) lecture 12 judgement decisions and reasoning Flashcards
What is the central idea behind heuristics?
Judgment and decision-making often rests on simplifying heuristics instead of extensive algorithmic processing
What is a heuristic?
A simple procedure that helps find adequate though often imperfect answers to difficult questions
What is a bias?
A systematic error of judgement
What is bounded rationality?
Humans reason and choose rationally but only within the constraints imposed by their limited search and computational capacities
What is satisficing?
Using experience of how good a solution we might reasonably achieve, and halting search as soon as a solution is reached that meets the expectation
What was Paul Meehl’s two major findings about clinical prediction?
Clinical prediction performs very poorly relative to statistical prediction, clinical prediction overweights case characteristics and underweights base rates
What are the two systems by Evans and Stanovich?
System 1 is intuitive, fast, non-conscious and automatic. System 2 is reflective, slow, conscious, and controlled
What are ways to improve system 2’s intervention?
Provide rewards to motivate participants, ensure that participants are not simultaneously having to perform other kinds of mental effort
What is question substitution?
Instead of seeking the answer to some complex question, seek the answer to an easier question you believe to be related
What is the representativeness heuristic?
Probability judgements (the likelihood that X is a Y) are substituted with assessments of resemblance (the degree to which X ‘looks like’ Y)
What is an example of the representative heuristic?
Linda is a bank teller problem, people tend to answer that Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement, when Linda is just a bank teller
Why does the problem in the Linda bank teller task occur?
Conjunction fallacy bias, asked a question about probability but participants were substituting for a question about similarity
What is the misperception of randomness?
“Random” has more repetition than people think
What is the law of large numbers?
Implies that large sample tend to produce results that represent the population
What did Tversky and Kahneman (1971) find out about the law of small numbers?
Psychologists had a mistaken confidence in the adequacy of small samples to represent populations
What is the “hot hand” phenomena?
People who have achieved recent success have a (temporarily) increased propensity to achieve more success
What did Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky (1985) find about the hot hand phenomena?
Peformed a 3-point shooting experiment with University basketball teams and found no hot hand
What is the availability heuristic?
Factors which come to mind are easily assigned greater weight in the formulation of judgements, we judge the likelihood/frequency of an event by the ease with which instances of it come to mind
What is an example of the availability heuristic?
Frequency of letters in the alphabet, when asked if words beginning with the letter k were more common than words with k in the third position, participants were 2:1 in favour of the first position when the third position is more common
What is the outcome bias?
A decision with a positive outcome is rated as superior to a decision with a negative outcome even when information available to the decision maker was the same in both cases
What is the affect heuristic?
Judgements are made in accordance with the intensity of the emotion felt
How are risk and benefit correlated?
Risk and benefit is positive correlated?
How do people think risk and benefit are correlated?
Think that risk and benefit are negatively correlated
What did Fimicane et al. (2000) find about people’s opinions about nuclear power?
Found that information about benefits impacted the perception of risk and vice versa
What did Slovic and Peters find in their study about the insensitivity of numbers?
Saving a percent of 150 lives was more supported than saving 150 lives
What is the anchoring heuristic?
When estimating quantities, people start with an intuitive reference point and make adjustments to it
How does the example study for the anchoring heuristic go?
A wheel is rigged to land on 10 or 65, “is the number higher of lower than percentage of African nations on the UN” and “What is your estimate of the percentage of African nations in the UN”
What are the results in the 10% condition?
Answer to the first question is lower, and best estimate is around 25%
What are the results in the 65% condition?
Answer to first question is higher, best estimate is 45%
What are the practical implications of the anchoring heuristic?
In criminal sentencing, ahead of mock judging, judges provide anchors for themselves by using dice. Salary negotiations, consumer behaviour
What are the criticisms of Kahneman’s work?
Lack external validity, vaguely theorised/specified an there has been lack of formal modelling, Overstates the problem caused by computational limitations of our brains
How id Kahneman’s work lack external validity?
Minor changes of wording could sometimes ‘de-bias’ people, eliciting frequencies rather than probabilities, emphasising the role of random sampling
How was Kahmeman’s work vague?
Heuristics like ‘availability’ and ‘representativeness’ could explain a very wide range of findings post hoc, formal models of heuristics should make quantitive predictions
What did Gigerenzer point out about Kahneman’s work?
Even if the mind had more computational resources, it does not follow that complex methods will outperform simple ones
What is the recognition heuristic?
If one of the two objects are recognised and the other is not, then infer that the recognised object has the higher value
What is an example of the recognition heuristic?
When asked “which city has more inhabitants, San Diego or San Antonio”, Americans only get 62% correct, Germans get 100% correct as they only recognise San Diego
What happens if both object are recognised?
Look up cues in order of validity, stop searching when there is evidence for one object but not the other
What were some regrets from Kahneman?
The term “heuristic” was misleading, inclusion of anchoring as a heuristic was misleading, substitution mechanism is not restricted to uncertainty
