Final Material Flashcards
What’s one of the major barriers to problem solving?
Being unable to ignore irrelevant information
What’s problem solving?
- A cognitive process that involves recognizing there is a problem, analyzing and solving it, and then verifying the effectiveness of the solution
- A multi-step process to shift your current problem state to a goal state
What’s the goal of problem solving?
The goal is to overcome barriers and find a solution that best resolves the problem
What’s a problem?
- Occurs when there’s an obstacle between an initial state and a goal state when you don’t know the solution right away
- Problems can range from small to large (planning your future career)
- What both small and large problems have in common is the mental process directed at achieving a goal when you do not know the solution right away
What are the mental processes that go into problem solving?
- First, after recognizing there’s a problem, you need to understand it by taking into account all the relevant information (including information available in the environment (bottom-up) and information from previous knowledge and experiences (top-down))
- As you actively solve problems, you search your memory for relationships between the current problem and past ones
- Information, such as specific facts, concepts, strategies, and beliefs about a particular problem, will influence the processing
- The next step is to figure out what steps to take to actually solve the problem
- To do that, you must think about the problem and generate a few possible solutions
- Thinking requires you to take all the relevant information into account (bottom and top) and manipulate that information in order to come up with possible solutions
- Once you’ve chosen a solution, you need to take the steps to solve the problem and, finally, you reflect on the effectiveness of your decision
Why is problem solving considered a cyclical, recursive, and applicable
process?
- When something’s recursive, that means its steps are repeated as many times as necessary
- Problem solving is considered cyclical because, once you arrive at a solution, you discover a new or similar problem, and have to use information gained in the past to work on a solution for the next problem
- Problem solving is considered applicable because you apply successful cycles (solutions) to new problems
According to Pertz et al. (2003), the problem solving cycle consists of what steps?
- Recognize or identify the problem
- Define and represent the problem mentally
- Develop a solution strategy
- Organize knowledge about the problem
- Allocate mental and physical resources for solving the problem
- Monitor progress toward the goal
- Evaluate the solution for accuracy
What does every model describing the process of problem solving have in common?
An initial state and a goal state
What’s the initial state of a problem?
In problem solving, it’s the initial situation or starting point of a problem
What’s the goal state of a problem?
In problem solving, it’s the desired final state or ending situation
Describe the problem space theory model (Newell & Simon, 1972)
- It states that problem solving is a search within problem space
- Problem space includes an initial state, a goal state, and intermediate states
- You move through the problem space from state to state through actions called operators
- Overall, problem solving is a search for the appropriate steps through the problem space
What are the intermediate states of a problem?
All the possible states in between each step in moving from an initial state to a goal state
What are operators?
Actions that transform the current problem state into another problem state
How do the most effective problem solvers and experts approach problems?
- They approach them slowly and think carefully about each part of the problem before trying to solve it
- This way, they’re able to use the most effective approach possible, based on all the information available
- This turns out to be very advantageous when problem solving
What are problem-solving questions compared to?
Visual illusions
What are the 2 main types of problems?
- Well-defined problems
- Ill-defined problems
What’s a well-defined problem?
- A problem that has a specific goal state, clearly defined solutions and clearly expected solutions
- Requirements are unambiguous
- They have correct answers, and certain procedures lead us to solve them
- All information needed to solve the problem is present
- These problems have clearly defined states that make them possible to be effectively solved by humans and computers, like computing math problems or playing chess
- The initial state, the goal state, and the operators (or actions) are clearly specified
- Goal directedness -> problems with a defined goal state and set task constraints (or rules) such that there are clear steps
-Because well-defined problems have solutions that can be broken down step by step, they are easily solved by using algorithms
What are algorithms?
A step-by-step procedure that should always produce a correct solution
We can use well-defined problems and computer simulations to study what?
- How humans solve problems
- Developing instructions for computer simulations (algorithms) helps us better understand how our brains could solve similar problems
- When writing a computer simulation for this purpose, the goal is to program it to complete tasks just as humans would
- That way, we can infer the actual mechanisms used by humans
- At times, this includes making mistakes and considering irrelevant information, just like we would
- The simulation shouldn’t perform any better or worse than a human
- The challenge is to write the program to imitate the same steps, and missteps, a human would make when solving the same problem
- This gives us insight on how us humans complete the same tasks
What’s an ill-defined problem?
- A problem that doesn’t have clear goal states, solution paths, or expected solutions (ambiguous)
- Requires added information
- Computers aren’t very good at solving these (Moravec’s paradox)
- Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that these problems don’t have one correct answer -> they can have multiple solutions
- They can also be solved in many different ways, and sometimes it’s not clear that you’ve even reached the right solution
- Many real-world problems such as choosing a major in college, relationship issues, or problems where morals or values must be taken into account, are ill-defined problems
- These types of problems are situational
- In these situations, the initial state, goal state, and the operators are not as clearly specified as they are in well-defined problems
What did Anderson (1985) state about problem-solving?
“It seems that all cognitive activities are fundamentally problem solving in nature. The basic argument is that human cognition is always purposeful, directed to achieving goals and removing obstacles to those goals”
What are the 2 main theories describing how we approach problem solving?
- Behaviourist approach
- Gestalt approach
Describe the behaviourist theory of how we approach problem solving
- Behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable behavior that results from simple input-output or stimulus-response pairs
- Similar to the ideas of reinforcement and punishment, the principles of cause and effect are the backbone of their problem-solving theory
What was Edward Thorndike’s perspective on how we approach problem solving?
- Edward Thorndike was a behaviorist who theorized that problem solving was a reproductive process
- Thorndike believed that we utilize a trial-and-error model of problem solving
- As we work toward solving a problem, we gain information with each trial attempted
- That information can then be used on subsequent trials, and on subsequent problems
How did Edward Thorndike experiment on the behaviourist view of problem-solving?
- Behaviorists like Thorndike did not see any fundamental difference between human and animal behavior
- He hence carried his problem-solving research out on cats
- He came up with his theory, the Law of Effect, after placing cats into puzzle boxes and recording how they learned to escape by trial and error
What’s the reproductive process?
- The process of problem solving that uses knowledge from past experiences (such as remembered examples and rules) and uses a trial and error strategy to work out solutions
- The reproductive process is a conscious and deliberate search through possible solutions to a problem
What’s trial-and-error?
- An approach to problem solving that involves trying a number of different solutions and ruling out those that don’t work
- As we work toward solving a problem, we gain information with each trial attempted
- That information can then be used on subsequent trials, and on subsequent problems
Describe Thorndike’s theory of the Law of Effect
- A response that produces a satisfying effect will become more likely to occur again in that situation, and a response that produce a discomforting effect will become less likely to occur again in that situation
- The theory states, “of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction are more firmly connected with the situation … ; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort … have their connections with the situation weakened”
- It’s a simple but rigid theory
- Any response that doesn’t produce a satisfying effect gradually becomes weaker, while any response that has a satisfying effect gradually becomes stronger
Describe the Gestalt theory of how we approach problem solving
- Gestaltists criticized behaviorists such as Thorndike for their rigid approach to the topic of problem solving
- Gestalt psychologists began studying problem solving in the 1920s and theorized that it was a productive process
- Gestaltists theorized that when people have insight or a-ha moments, they’re in the process of restructuring
- How people solve problems depends on how they understand or represent the problems in their mind
- Gestalt psychologists thought that how people approach a problem is based on their knowledge and experience of what has worked in the past
- The motto of the Gestalt psychologists: “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” influenced how Gestalt researchers looked at the task of studying problem solving
- Gestaltists were not just interested in studying the steps in a problem-solving task, they were interested in all the parts that make up problem solving as a whole, and one way they learned about the process was by studying the barriers to problem solving
- Understanding where things can go wrong can help us to discover where things can go right, leading us to a better understanding of the process as a whole
How did Max Wertheimer (1959), one of the founders of the Gestalt approach, describe the difference between reproductive and productive thinking?
While the reproductive process uses previous knowledge and a trial-and-error strategy, it doesn’t explain phenomena such as insight
What’s insight?
- The phenomenon where the solution to a problem suddenly comes to consciousness
- As you’re working on a problem and manipulating information, you sometimes have these flashes of insight
- This insight relies on the reorganization of your mental representation of a problem
- Insight occurs during the productive process, when information is restructured and the solution to a problem suddenly comes into consciousness
- Insight often seems surprising because people are typically unaware of how it occurs, even though they are confident in the solutions it reveals
Describe the productive process of problem-solving
- Productive problem solving occurs when you are thinking about a problem and it’s characterized by manipulating and restructuring information about it in your mind
- Productive thinking is your ability to reconsider, reframe, rethink, or consider a problem from multiple points of view
- The key mechanism of problem solving, according to this view, is the restructuring of information in your mind
- You have to be able to think flexibly about all the possible ways to represent the problem and all the possible ways to solve the problem
- To do this, you have to actively manipulate or think about information and change its representation in your mind
What are heuristics?
- Mental shortcuts or rules-of-thumb that can be used to help solve problems, based on simple properties of the available information
- These can be used to get a quick and mostly accurate response in some situations but may lead to errors in others
- They can be thought of as rules of thumb, educated guesses, common sense, or even intuitive judgements
- They are mental problem-solving shortcuts based on simple properties such as, experience with similar problems or the idea that the simplest answer is the best answer
- Relying on heuristics often makes sense because they usually get us to our goals without taking a lot of processing power
- There are many different types of heuristics
- By using heuristics, we use less cognitive processing power and focus attention on the goal state, and perhaps even the next problem
- Using heuristics does lessen the cognitive load, but they aren’t always the best method available -> sometimes, they can create barriers to successful problem solving
The likelihood of using a type of heuristic increases when one of the following conditions is met….
- When one is faced with too much information.
- When the time to make a decision is limited.
- When the decision to be made is unimportant.
- When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision.
- When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment.
When it comes to solving problems, rather than waste time and processing power, we regularly take mental shortcuts by using what?
Heuristics
What’s working backwards?
- A heuristic in which you begin solving a problem by focusing on the end result
- You use the working-backwards heuristic to plan events of your day on a regular basis, likely without even realizing it
- Newall et al. (1962) suggested working backwards is even superior to working forward, so it makes sense that we use it so readily
Give an example of the working backwards heuristic
- Imagine that you have a lunch date with your best friend at 1pm and that you have to pick them up on the way to the restaurant
- Before you go, you also have to set aside some time to shower and get ready
- To know what time you should start getting ready, you work backwards
- First, you start at 1pm and consider how long it takes to get to the restaurant from your friend’s house, then how long it takes to get from your house to your friend’s house, and finally how long it takes for you to get ready
What’s the means-end analysis?
- A heuristic in problem solving in which you create sub-goals as you move closer to the final goal state
- You basically break down a larger goal into smaller sub-goals which will each bring you closer and closer to the goal state
- The final goal is kept in mind, but the sub-goals are used in order to reach the final goal and make corrections or decisions along the way
- Means-end analysis is often used in artificial intelligence (AI)
- The goal in AI involves setting up smaller sub-goals on the way to a goal state and then reevaluating your decision at each step
- In means-end analysis, you move through sub-goals within a larger goal in order to analyze progress toward the goal state
- In this way, means-end analysis is more flexible than other strategies
What are some barriers to problem-solving?
- Being unable to ignore irrelevant information
- The tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use -> functional fixedness
- Heuristics -> which can prevent us from considering information that may be important
Describe the “being unable to ignore irrelevant information” barrier to problem-solving
- Ignoring irrelevant information is a skill that develops in young children then declines in old age
- This isn’t a behavior that we are born with, it is something that we must acquire during development
- Information that is irrelevant often misguides people and leads them down dead-end paths
- Part of successful problem solving includes deciding what is relevant to the task at hand
- This tends to be more difficult when you’re dealing with ill-defined problems than when you are dealing with well-defined problems
Describe the functional fixedness barrier to problem-solving
- Functional fixedness is the tendency to view objects only for their intended purpose because of prior experience with that object OR the tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use
- This happens when the intended purpose of an object inhibits you from seeing its other potential uses
- There’s an inability to figure out a new use for an object because of your experience using the object in another way so many times
- No fixedness in children without pre-utilization
- Ex: children of different ages solved the ‘candle’ problem
- Too much experience may lead to fixedness and the Einstellung effect
People tend to focus on what, which inhibits them from arriving at a solution?
People tend to focus on a specific characteristic of a problem, a fixation, which inhibits them from arriving at a solution
What’s a fixation?
The tendency to focus on a specific characteristic of a problem
What’s an insight problem?
A problem in which the solution occurs suddenly into your consciousness
What’s a non-insight problem?
A problem distinguished by the process of consciously working through each step of a problem to arrive at a solution
Describe Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) study on whether there’s a difference between solving different types of problems
- They gave participants verbal insight problems or non-insight algebra problems to solve
- While the participants were working on the problems, the researchers asked them every 15 seconds how close they felt they were to a solution by indicating their feeling of warmth
- They found, when solving non-insight problems, participants were able to predict, with some accuracy, how close they were to solving the problem
- On the other hand, participants who were solving the insight problems were very poor at estimating how close they were to the final solution
- Overall, the researchers determined that there were, in fact, two different classes of problems that relied on different cognitive processes
Describe Maier’s (1931) findings on solving problems that demonstrate insight when hints to the correct solution were provided
- He evaluated his 2 strings experiment
- Out of 61 participants, roughly 40% solved the two-string problem without any hints or help
- While the remainder of the participants were trying to figure out the solution, the experimenter would nonchalantly run into the ropes causing them to swing back and forth
- This cue to the right answer (tying the hammer to the end of one of the ropes to cause a swinging pendulum, which would swing into your reach) helped 38% of the rest of the participants solve the problem. However, some of those in the 38% needed a second hint, and were provided with a hammer and told the problem could be solved using it
- 33% of those participants were unable to find the solution even with both hints
- Out of the participants who suddenly got their a-ha moment, when asked how they solved the problem, most of the participants were unaware that Maier swung the rope as a cue or hint -> some of them would even offer creative stories of how they solved the problem and very few of the participants mentioned the cue that Maier provided them
- Maier went a step further and presented more cues that would not help solve the problem, along with the original cue of walking into the rope causing it to swing
- If participants solved the problem in these conditions, they were just as likely to mention the useless cues as they were likely to mention the useful cue Maier provided them
- This demonstrates a complete lack of consciousness in the nature of insight
What is creativity often associated with?
Divergent thinking
Describe Guilford’s (1967) ideas about divergent thinking
- Guilford (1967) was the first to connect divergent thinking and creativity
- He characterized divergent thinking as a thought process that could generate many solutions to a problem in order to determine one that works well enough to consider the problem solved
- Divergent thinking can be contrasted with convergent thinking
What’s convergent thinking?
Convergent thinking usually leads to conventional solutions rather than coming up with many creative options
What’s creativity?
Being able to produce novel ideas that are appropriate and that are relevant to the situation
What are the 3 facets of human intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence (1977 & 1985)?
- Analytical
- Practical
- Creative
What’s analytical intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence?
- Basic academic problem-solving skills such as solving analogies and puzzles
- This is similar to what standard IQ scores measure
What’s practical intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence?
- The ability to understand and deal with everyday tasks
- AKA street smarts
What’s creative intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence?
- It focuses on developing ideas, applying new ideas, and creating solutions
- Creative intelligence includes the ability to use existing knowledge and skills in order to deal with novelty and create ideas that are appropriate given the current situation and that are also valuable
What’s ideational fluency?
- A measure where the number of ideas a person can generate about a particular topic or item is used to assess their creativity
- We can quantify creativeness by simply adding up all the ideas created, that are useful
- The more ideas one creates, the more creative they are thought to be
Describe how Zirhlioglu (2012) analyzed the relationship between problem solving and creativity and what his findings were
- He administered 2 scales:
1. A “Problem Solving Inventory,” developed by Heppner and Peterson (1982)
2. The “How Creative Are You Scale,” developed by Raudsepp (1979) - He found that there is a positive directional relationship between problem solving and creativity
Describe the findings of Karl Duncker’s candle problem
- As in the two-string problem, functional fixedness created a barrier to successfully solve the candle problem
- Seeing the matchbox as only being a container to hold matches, and not a shelf to hold the candle, created a barrier to successfully solving the problem
- When Dunker (1945) supplied the matchbox empty, participants were 2x as likely to solve the problem
- Seeing the matchbox as an empty container encouraged participants to “think outside the box.”
- A more creative person moves past their fixations of a box only being a container, or a pencil only being a tool to write with, and come up with novel ideas in order to creatively solve problems
Describe the nine-dot problem (Maier, 1930)
- The nine-dot problem is actually connected to the origin of the statement “think outside the box”
- The nine-dot problem requires you to connect 9 dots, arranged in a 3X3 matrix, to be connected by 4 straight lines drawn without lifting your pen and without retracing the same line; the lines need to cross through all 9 dots
- Most people don’t solve this problem, less than 5% of participants were able to solve the problem, even after several minutes of working on it
- The nine-dot problem is difficult because people are fixated on the idea that the dots create a square that does not extend outside of the dots themselves. You may assume that telling participants that they can draw outside the square created by the dots would facilitate the solution
- However, Burnham and Davis (1969) and Weisberg and Alba (1981) found that that cue only worked if combined with other cues that gave away part of the solution
- When trying to solve this problem, you must “think outside of the box” to come up with the correct solution
Describe Luchins (1942) water-jug problem
- In this problem, you’re given a few jugs, each with a different capacity to hold water and asked to measure out a very specific amount of water to end up with
- You have to solve the problem of how to use these jugs to end up with exactly the specified amount of water
- With this problem, we can see how using what has worked in the past can sometimes help you solve a problem, and other times it can create a barrier to success
- Luchins used the water-jug problem to investigate a problem solver who creates mental sets in order to find quick solutions to problems
- Luchins found that when participants created a mental set, they kept trying the same solution to a problem that they’ve used in the past, even though the problem could be solved by using a simpler method -> demonstrating inflexibility in thinking
What are mental sets?
- A mental set is the tendency to use solutions that have worked in the past, or the tendency to respond to something in a given, or set, way
- Mental sets are another example of a heuristic that can speed up problem solving or it can act as a barrier
- Unfortunately, this can make problem solvers blind to alternative possibilities and simpler methods that are available
- When creating a mental set, people usually pay attention to similarities or relationships between past problems and current ones
- Once this relationship has been established, people will keep trying the same solution to a problem that has worked in the past, even though the current problem could be solved by using a different method, that in many cases is much simpler
- Mental sets can also lead to inflexible thinking
What’s the difference between experts and novices?
- Because experts have extensive knowledge, they organize that knowledge differently than novices, they notice features and patterns that others may not, and, their expertise affects the way they perceive and represent information in their environment
- Novices, on the other hand, know little and have little, if any, experience about a particular topic or skill. Therefore, they don’t understand how the information is organized
- Experts spend more time analyzing problems and less time thinking about what steps to take than novices do
- Compared to novices, experts take more time to analyze and organize a solution before they begin to work on solving it
- Novices are conscious of their task performance process and this causes an additional load on cognitive processing
- Even though experts have a slower start than novices, they quickly catch up and outperform the novices, who spend less time analyzing problems and more time in the trial-and-error phase
- While experts have a leg up in many cases, novices benefit from creative thinking (thinking outside the box) while experts are stuck with conventional ways of thinking
- Expert radiologists use ‘global’ visual processes when viewing scans
Describe how Sheridan and Reingold (2014) demonstrated that experts were better than novices at overcoming the barrier to problem-solving of the inability to ignore irrelevant information
- They tracked the eye movements of expert and novice chess players to see if they were attending to relevant or irrelevant areas of the chessboard when deciding on their next move
- While both groups of participants spent more time fixating on the relevant areas of the board, the experts were faster at detecting which areas were relevant in the first place
An expert’s ability to remember, reason, and solve problems are affected by what?
By the extent of their knowledge
Describe Chase and Simon’s study on expert and novice chess players and their memory for chess arrangements
- They demonstrated that expert chess players are far superior to novices in their memory for chess arrangements
- Groups of expert chess players, with more than 10,000 hours of playtime, and novices, with fewer than 100 hours of playtime, were shown a chessboard with actual game arrangements for 5 seconds
- After that, they were asked to reproduce the same arrangement
- Experts did much better than the novices
- However, when the pieces were randomly arranged, experts performed no better than novices
- Experts were able to remember more pieces when the pieces were in actual game arrangements because they have stored in their long-term memories patterns of arrangements that they could remember in terms of chunks
- They have a larger and better-organized store of knowledge than the novices do
- This shows that experts are not more intelligent than novices, they just have more knowledge in a specific field, and have better organization of information related to that expertise
What are chunks?
- Any combination of letters, numbers, or sounds that constitute a meaningful whole
- It’s the proposed unit for measuring capacity in STM
Describe the expert’s approach to problem solving
- As you become an expert on a particular topic or skill, performance becomes automatic
- In the beginning, experts spend more time matching a particular problem to those they have previously encountered
- They categorize problems based on the principles that the current problems have in common with others they have faced
- Experts use what they already know, based on their expertise, in order to plan steps to take to solve the problem
- Once they have decided what to do, they quickly follow out their plan using mostly automatic processing
Why are experts stuck with conventional ways of thinking when problem-solving, as opposed to the creative thinking novices use?
- It could be the case that the experts have created such a strong mental set that they are unable to be flexible in their problem-solving techniques
- On the other hand, a novice has not created a mental set and has the advantage of being able to think outside the box
- Or, the experts’ programmed automatic response, which is supposed to help them conserve processing power, could, in certain cases, hold them back from coming up with novel and perhaps better solutions
What’s the information processing approach?
- The information processing approach describes what happens between stimulus and response
- This approach sees people as processors of information
- Information about a problem enters your system. Then, in order to manipulate the information, you draw related information from your long-term memory into your working memory
- Ideally, the related information will help you arrive at a solution because it comes form experience with similar problems
In order to solve problems, humans use heuristics while computers use what?
Algorithms
Why are solutions derived from heuristics not predicable like the solutions derived from algorithms?
Because the solutions derived from heuristics are educated guesses and intuitive judgements that don’t always guarantee a correct solution
What’s the difference in information processing between humans computers?
- In humans and computers, this is all directed by executive control processes which direct, monitor, select, manipulate, and interpret information
- Computers are able to use an unbelievable amount of high-speed processing power in order to work out many possible solutions to a problem and choose the best possible one quickly
- Compared to computers, humans have very limited processing power, which constrains how many steps of a problem and how many solutions can be considered at one time
- People must represent changing states as they move toward a solution which can take up a lot of processing power
What are algorithms?
A step-by-step procedure that should always produce a correct solution
What’s the tower of Hanoi and what does it say about information processing in humans?
- The Tower of Hanoi consists of 3 pegs with 3 (or more) discs stacked on the first peg with the largest peg on the bottom and the smallest on the top
- The challenge is to move the discs to another peg and restack them with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on the top
- You may only move one disc at a time
- A larger disc must not be placed on a smaller disc
- This problem shows that people must represent changing states as they move toward a solution which, as you’ll see, can take up a lot of your processing power
How can computers be compared to humans using the information processing approach?
Because they both combine new, incoming information with what is already stored in memory and both have a central processor with limited capacity
How do humans and computers differ with how they solve the tower of hanoi problem?
- Because of the limits to the processing power of our working memory, we’re only able to consider a few possible steps toward our goal at once
- With each move you make in the Tower of Hanoi, the state of the problem changes and you must reconsider the problem
- Computers, on the other hand, have enough processing power to calculate all possible moves at once and, therefore, are very fast at solving well-defined problems such as the Tower of Hanoi and playing games such as chess successfully
What’s the problem-solving cycle?
- Define the problem
- Brainstorm solutions
- Pick a solution
- Implement the solutions
- Review the results
Engaging in problem solving is …
- Cyclical
- Recursive
- Applicable
Why is engaging in problem-solving considered cyclical?
Because we enact steps that occur in a loop
Why is engaging in problem-solving considered recursive?
Because we repeat this cycle as many times as necessary to find a solution
Why is engaging in problem-solving considered applicable?
Because we apply successful cycles (solutions) to new problems
What’s an example of a well-defined problem?
Puzzles
What’s an example of an ill-defined problem?
Broken laptop
Describe the study by Vartanian and Goel (2005) on ill-defined and well-defined problems
- In this study they gave participants anagrams
- One of the anagrams was well-defined (constraints) -> “Can you make a type of music with ZJAZ” -> constrains one to think
only of music - One of the anagrams was ill-defined (no constraints) -> “Can you make a word with ZJAZ”
- They compared brain activity under those 2 conditions
- They found greater activity in the right lateral prefrontal cortex for ill-defined anagrams -> this region is really important for organizing
- Solving ill-defined problems carries a greater ‘cognitive load’
What’s cognitive load?
The amount of information held in mind at one time
What’s reasoning?
- The action of drawing new conclusions from existing information
- Thought process that brings an individual to a conclusion
- We often have incomplete information about the world and must leverage this limited information in order to draw further conclusions
- This process is often a prerequisite to making a final decision
- Once we have drawn these conclusions, we still often have multiple possible choices of behavior before us
- Reasoning guides decision making (people make 35,000 decisions a day)
- A high-order cognitive domain
What’s decision making?
- The action of choosing a specific course of behavioral actions from among multiple possibilities
- It represents a separate, though highly related, cognitive task in addition to reasoning
- These decisions can be about small choices (red or blue dress) or big ones (take the job or keep looking)
For much of its history, research on decision making has been driven by ideas from what?
- Economic theory
- A cornerstone of this approach is the expected utility hypothesis (EUT)
What’s the expected utility hypothesis (EUT)?
- A theory from economics that holds that people make a decision in accordance with maximizing expected value
- First investigated by the mathematician David Bernoulli, in the 18th century
- An assumption of EUT is that when people are faced with multiple options, they will choose the one that returns the highest likely value
- According to this view, people are economically rational creatures pursuing the logical course of action based on their goals
- In this case, reasoning and decision-making should be fully predictable based on mathematical analysis of the decision itself
- However, this viewpoint came under intense criticism with the groundbreaking research of two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
Describe the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that put into question the expected utility hypothesis (EUT)
- They demonstrated, through many experiments, that people are often predictably irrational
- In particular, they showed that people can be induced to make systematic errors in both reasoning and decision making
- Like visual illusions, these errors in specific cases yield insight into the mechanisms underlying typical decision making, even when it leads to a useful outcome
What gave birth to the relatively new field of neuroeconomics?
- Discoveries like the expected utility hypothesis (EUT) and Kahneman & Tversky’s research, along with the rise of imaging techniques, has given birth to the relatively new field of neuroeconomics
What’s neuroeconomics?
- A field of research that combines economics (economic theory), psychology, and neuroscience in order to try to understand and predict human choices and decisions
- Studying how we make decisions, formalizing theories and linking it to the development of the brain
Before we can make a decision, we first need to do what?
We first need to determine what information we can bring to bear on the situation based on the information we currently have -> reasoning
The process of looking for your keys may rely on what?
The process of looking for your keys may rely on multiple types of reasoning
Reasoning begins with what?
Reasoning begins with a set of beliefs, or premises
What are premises?
An estimate about whether certain possible facts about the world, called propositions, are true
What are propositions?
- Any statement that can be true or false
- Can refer to properties of the external world (“I don’t have my keys”) or about our own experiences (“I remember leaving my keys on the counter”)
- This allows us to draw new conclusions from the available information (“My keys are on the counter now”)
What are the 2 basic classes of reasoning?
- Deduction
- Induction
What’s deduction (deductive reasoning)?
- Formal systems for generating statements that will be true if rules of the system are followed
- Using general theories to reason about specific observations/circumstances
- Using an idea to make a prediction and inferences
- Ex:
- My general belief is that “The Cog Dog loves Cognition”
- The Cog Dog is a dog
- I assume all dogs love cognition
- A kind of reasoning processes where the conclusion follows directly and logically from the initial premises
- So long as the premises are true, this allows us to draw a certain conclusion from them
- Ex: as long as you are correct that you left your keys on the counter and that no one else moved them, you can conclude with certainty that they are still there, based on a deductive process
- Once you realize they aren’t on the counter, you conclude that one of your premises must be wrong
- This leads you to use past information to determine the most likely place they could be
What’s induction?
A kind of reasoning which relies on generalizing from a certain set of information and extending it to make an informed guess
Who is credited with first laying out the rules of deductive reasoning in an effort to determine what is knowable with certainty based on a set of premises?
The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle
Deduction is related to what field?
The field of logic
Describe the field of logic
- Founded by Aristotle
- Concerned with determining what kinds of inferences can be made, with certainty, from a given set of statements
- The field of logic isn’t concerned with people’s behaviors or tendencies in making such inferences
- Instead, logic is more like math, in that it lays out a formal system for generating statements that will definitely be true if the rules of the system are followed
- Of course, people aren’t always logical and thus don’t always follow these rules
- However, logic can be seen as laying out the basic truth of reasoning to which human behavior can be compared
- This is similar to comparing human perception of the world to the actual conditions of the physical world
What’s the most basic form of deductive reasoning studied by Aristotle?
The syllogism
What’s the syllogism?
- A kind of reasoning that involves drawing a conclusion from 2 or more propositional statements
- The premises (propositions) are presumed to be true
- Determine if the premise statements support the conclusion based on the logical structure not the content
- Major premise (general)
- Minor premise (specific)
- Conclusion (test)
What’s the most well-known type of syllogism, actually described by Aristotle himself?
Categorical syllogism
What’s categorical syllogism?
- A kind of syllogism consisting of 3 statements: 2 premises and 1 conclusion
- What the syllogism tells us is that as long as both premises 1 and 2 are true, then the conclusion will also be true
Give an example of a categorical syllogism
Premise 1: All animals eat food.
Premise 2: A rabbit is an animal.
Conclusion: Therefore, rabbits eat food.
- This particular type of example is called Aristotle’s “perfect” syllogism because it is obviously true (and was actually described by Aristotle himself)
- Note that the structure of the syllogism—not the specific premises—is what matters
What’s a valid syllogism?
- A syllogism where the conclusion follows directly from the premises
- However, just because a particular syllogism is valid, doesn’t mean it’s true
- Is the conclusion true given the premises’ logical form?
- Valid = follows logical rules
-> not whether the info is true about the world - A valid structure (All A are B : All B are C: Therefore, all A are C)
- Ex: All birds are animals
All animals eat food Therefore, all birds eat food
OR
All birds are animals
All animals have four legs Therefore, all birds have four legs
The actual truth of the syllogism depends on what?
- The actual truth of the syllogism depends on whether the 2 initial premises are true
- Ex:
Premise 1: All men have beards.
Premise 2: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates has a beard. - The following is a valid syllogism, but clearly not true; while the conclusion follows from the premises, Premise 1, in this case, is false, making the conclusion false as well
What’s the point of syllogisms?
The point of syllogisms isn’t to assess the underlying truth of premises but, rather, to determine what conclusions follow from certain statements
What are invalid syllogisms called?
Fallacies
What did the highly influential developmental psychologist Jean Piaget believe about reasoning?
- He believed that the ability to reason deductively is a critical step in psychological development underlying many cognitive functions
- However, the view of people as trusty logicians has not held up well under careful scrutiny, as researchers began to test actual adult performance in deductive reasoning tasks
- Instead of clear, logical thinking, they found that there were a number of behavioral quirks that led people to make consistent errors in deductive reasoning, inconsistent with simply applying the rules of logic
Describe Evans (2002) study on syllogisms
- He presented participants with these 4 syllogisms:
Syllogism 1
Premise 1: No police dogs are vicious.
Premise 2: Some highly trained dogs are vicious.
Conclusion: Therefore, some highly trained dogs are not police dogs.
Syllogism 2
Premise 1: No nutritional things are inexpensive.
Premise 2: Some vitamin tablets are inexpensive.
Conclusion: Therefore, some vitamin tablets are not nutritional.
Syllogism 3
Premise 1: No addictive things are inexpensive.
Premise 2: Some cigarettes are inexpensive.
Conclusion: Therefore, some addictive things are not cigarettes.
Syllogism 4
Premise 1: No millionaires are hard workers.
Premise 2: Some rich people are hard workers.
Conclusion: Therefore, some millionaires are not rich people.
- Both 1 and 2 are valid while 3 and 4 are invalid
- Participants in this experiment rated 1 as valid at a much higher rate than 2, despite their logical equivalence
- This is even more pronounced in the second pair, where participants rated 3 as valid at a much higher rate than 4, despite both of these being invalid for the same reason
- Evans argued that this was because the conclusions of 1 and 3 were much more believable than those of 2 and 4 -> belief bias
What’s the belief bias?
- A bias in deductive reasoning in which conclusions that are more believable are rated as being more valid
- People have problems reasoning with syllogisms in which logical validity conflicts with truth
- When a conclusion is believable people are much less likely to question its logic
- When a conclusion is unbelievable, it’s much harder for people to accept, even when the logic is sound
- Ex:
All older adults are tired (All A are B)
Some tired people are irritable (Some C are D) Therefore, some older adults are irritable (Some A are D)
All students live in Montreal(All A are B)
Some people who live in Montreal are millionaires (Some C are D)
Therefore, some students are millionaires (Some A are D)
- Both are invalid; but people will often say the first syllogism is valid because it’s easier to believe there are irritable old people out there over millionaire students
What causes the belief bias?
- One possibility is that this is evidence of the kind of cognitive shortcuts people take in reasoning
- Rather than carefully reasoning through the premises, people might sometimes rapidly assess whether the overall argument seems valid using “quick and dirty” reasoning
- Evidence for this comes from Evans (2005), who found that the belief bias declined when people were given as much time as they wanted to think about the syllogism compared with when they were given only a few seconds to respond
Describe Evans (2005) study on the relationship between the belief bias and time
He found that the belief bias declined when people were given as much time as they wanted to think about the syllogism compared with when they were given only a few seconds to respond
What’s the atmosphere effect?
- A tendency to rate conclusions as more valid when the qualifying words (e.g., “all,” “some”) in the premises match those in the conclusions
- Ex:
Premise 1: Some Greeks are men.
Premise 2: Some Greeks are clever.
Conclusion: Therefore, some men are clever.
What do both the belief bias and atmosphere effect suggest?
They suggest that people (at least people who are not logicians) don’t analyze syllogisms by simply applying the rules of logic
What’s the influential theory, proposed by Phillip Johnson-Laird (1983), about what people are actually doing when evaluating syllogisms?
- Mental model theory
- That people construct mental models/simulations of the world based on statements (e.g. syllogisms) to judge logic and validity
- If the syllogism involves concrete concepts (men and beards, say, rather than As and Bs), then people will generate visualizations of the sentences and then mentally explore them to see whether the model breaks down
Ex:
Premise 1: No addictive things are inexpensive.
Premise 2: Some cigarettes are inexpensive.
Conclusion: Therefore, some addictive things are not cigarettes. - According to Johnson-Laird, people determine whether this is valid by imagining the items described (forming a mental simulation of the world fleshed out with all our relevant knowledge)
- So, we may picture an empty bin at a store labelled Addictive and a price tag with $$$ to show that any items found in that bin will be expensive
- With the second premise we picture cigarettes sitting outside the bin, which means that they’re inexpensive and therefore not addictive
- With the conclusion, we look at our mental model and see whether there are items inside the addictive bin that are not cigarettes, as the conclusion suggests. But there are no items, cigarettes or otherwise, inside the addictive bin, so the conclusion is not supported
- Issue: can’t imagine negative statements -> thus, people tend to have more trouble reasoning with negative information
What are mental models?
A kind of mental simulation of the world
What’s the most heavily studied and supported theory of deductive reasoning?
- The mental model theory
- Although this theory has not been proven conclusively
In the 19th century, the study of logic was expanded to include additional types of syllogisms, namely….
The conditional or hypothetical syllogism
What’s the conditional (or hypothetical) syllogism?
- A kind of syllogism that involves a conditional claim that states a rule that relates 2 propositions
- Ex: If “P” then “Q”
- The first proposition (“P” after if) is called the antecedent, while whatever comes after “then” (“Q”) is called the consequent
- Like other syllogisms, the validity is independent of what the antecedent and consequent actually say
- All that deduction tells you is what follows from what
- The antecedent and consequent from the conditional claim can be arranged in 2 different locations within the statements, either as being true (affirming) or false (denying)
What are the 2 valid deductions we can make with a conditional/hypothetical syllogism?
- The deductive rule of modus ponens, or affirming the antecedent
- Modus tollens or denying the consequent
- The invalid deductions look superficially similar but are ultimately logically invalid
What’s the deductive rule of modus ponens (or affirming the antecedent)?
A rule in relation to conditional syllogisms in which if the antecedent is observed to be true, then the consequent may be concluded to be true
What’s the deductive rule of modus tollens (or denying the consequent)?
A rule in relation to conditional syllogisms when we observe that the consequent is false and conclude that the antecedent must be false as well
What’s affirming the consequent?
An invalid conclusion from a conditional syllogism in which one concludes the antecedent is true because the consequent is true
What’s denying the antecedent?
- A kind of invalid reasoning from a conditional syllogism in which one concludes that the consequent is false based on the antecedent being false
- Just because the antecedent is false does not imply the consequent is false
How well do people do when assessing conditional syllogisms as shown in Evans (1993) study?
- Performance is very uneven across the various syllogisms
- While people are nearly perfect for modus ponens/affirming the antecedent (valid 97%), their performance drops dramatically for modus tollens/denying the consequent (valid 60%)
- People are generally worse at correctly identifying syllogisms as invalid than they are at establishing them as valid
- Affirming the consequent -> invalid 40%
- Denying the antecedent -> invalid 40%
Describe Wason’s (1968) groundbreaking experiment investigating how people assess conditional claims, or rules
- He presented participants with a set of 4 cards with letters printed on one side and numbers printed on the other, along with a simple rule that may or may not be true about these 4 cards
- The rule was “if there’s a vowel on one side, there’s an even number on the other side” and there were 4 cards, an “E” card, “K” card, “4” card, “7” card
- Each card will have a version of “P” on one side and “Q” on the other
- He asked participants to turn over all of the cards that are relevant to determining whether the stated rule is true or not
- Most participants in Wason’s experiment got it wrong
- While a majority correctly chose the E card as one that needed to be turned over, only 4% percent correctly chose the 7 as a card that should be turned over
- Meanwhile, a little less than a majority chose the 4 card as one that should be turned over, even though it is not necessary
- Have to turn over card ‘E’ and ‘7’ to test if a vowel = even number and if
not even then not vowel - In this experiment, you need to turn over cards that are (1) relevant to the problem (vowels and numbers) and (2) information that could disconfirm that rule
- While participants did very poorly in Wason’s original task, some researchers suspected that people would do better when the rules they had to test weren’t about abstract meaningless things like vowels and letters but instead were couched in real-life examples of rules
What’s the key to testing a rule?
To check cases that have the potential to prove it wrong or falsify it
What’s the confirmation bias?
- Termed by Wason (1960)
- A kind of invalid reasoning from a conditional syllogism in which one concludes that the consequent is false based on the antecedent being false
- The tendency to find supporting evidence for a hypothesis or belief
- There is clearly a tendency for many people to seek out confirming information rather than disconfirming
- It appears to be a pervasive behavior across many areas of belief formation, such as political and moral beliefs, not just deductive reasoning
- Wason’s task of conditional reasoning shows the confirmation bias -> people have a hard time w/ this task because you have to falsify the claim and we have a confirmation bias where we seek out information to confirm our beliefs and have a hard time with falsifying information
Describe Griggs and Cox (1982) version of Wason’s four-card task used to investigate how people assess conditional claims or rules
- They came up with a logically identical version of the four-card task but with a different rule to test
- This version tests familiarity effects
- In this case, people were told to imagine a police officer who is checking out whether there’s underage drinking going on in a bar
- In this case, each card has the age of a person on one side and the drink they are having on the other
- The rule was “if a person is drinking alcohol, they must be 21yrs old” and there were 4 cards, an “beer” card, “soda” card, “24 years old” card, “16 years old” card
- Cards have age on one side and beverage on the other side
- They found that 73% of participants now chose the right card, a dramatic improvement over the 4% in the original (Wason)
- However, this example is logically identical to the original: The cards marked soda and 24 are equivalent to the K and 4 cards, respectively. Neither of them needs to be turned over because they would not show the rule being broken regardless of what is on the other side
- Many fewer people chose to turn them over
- People have an easier time with this task when they can relate the cards to real-world scenarios
- This shows that we really bring prior content when we’re engaging in reasoning
What’s a possible reason as to why there is such a difference between the second example of the card task versus Wason’s original?
- People perform logical reasoning more effectively when dealing with concrete, real-world examples that are similar to the kind of reasoning people engage in all the time
- This allows them to look for similar patterns to past examples without having to analytically inspect the logical forms of the statements
What did British philosopher David Hume state that things that we consider to be certain, in other words, most of what we call knowledge are based on?
- Inferential guessing
- Ex: he argued that we don’t know that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening; instead, we expect this to happen because we have observed that this is the case many times before
- There is no logical reason the earth couldn’t stand still or turn the other way and while it might be tempting to say that this would conflict with scientific laws, the point is that these very laws are just based on organizing and describing past observations
- It wouldn’t defy logic for these laws themselves to change
- Hume argued that our entire notion of A causing B is only based on past observations
- Hume’s insight caused something of a crisis for philosophy in his day
What’s an induction?
- A “probably but not definitely true”–type of reasoning
- A kind of reasoning which relies on generalizing from a certain set of information/observations and extending it to make an informed guess
- Form of reasoning in which one goes beyond the available data to make more general assumptions/conclusions from specific observations
- We can think of this as the inverse of deduction, where we start off with a rule and then draw conclusions about some additional statement(s) based on observations
- In this case, we make observations and use them to infer a rule
- These conclusions could be wrong/false
- Our everyday existence depends on such inferences
- Ex: Every time we step on the brakes of our car expecting it to stop, or step in front of a moving car and expect the driver to step on their brakes, we are depending on induction
- Most of life would simply be impossible to live without it
Ex:
Observation: All the cats I have ever seen are furry.
Conclusion: All cats are furry.
Ex: - Claire bought ice cream from the same Dairy Queen 5x
- Claire enjoyed it each time.
- Claire concludes that the next time she is at Dairy Queen, she will have quality ice cream that she will enjoy
List different types of inductive reasoning that logicians have identified
- Generalization
- Statistical syllogism
- Argument from analogy
What’s generalization?
- Extrapolation from a limited number of observations to draw a conclusion about the broader population or category
- This kind of induction is extremely prevalent in scientific research which almost always depends on generalizing from a representative sample to a specific or general population
- The level of support for a generalization can depend on several factors, including the size of your sample to the degree of variability of the property you are trying to estimate
What’s statistical syllogism?
- A form of inductive reasoning in which observations about a group lead to an inference about an individual
- Ex: you might assume that your friend Steve has a cell phone based on the fact that you’ve observed that most people you know have cell phones
What’s argument from analogy?
- A kind of inductive reasoning in which there’s the observation that 2 things share some set of properties and conclude that they must share a different property
- Ex: you know a friend tends to share many political opinions with you. While you have never discussed controversial topic X, you may be likely to assume that the friend will share your opinion on that topic as well
The process of induction is not just fundamental to determining current facts about the world (e.g., where your keys are) but underlies much of what kind of learning?
- It underlies much of human learning
- Applying learned rules to new situations (observations -> analysis -> theory)
- Learning the meaning of words always requires some inductive leaps to go from the specific to the general, a problem first pointed out by the philosopher Quine (1960)
- Ex: suppose a mother is showing her child a tablet. She points to it and says, “This is a tablet.” To the child, tablet can mean many things. It could mean the tablet’s shape or function, it could mean white, or it could even mean a specific app running on the tablet
- Despite this massive ambiguity, children (and adults) somehow do learn language as well as other, non-linguistic concepts
- One remarkable ability demonstrated by children and adults is called one-shot learning, which requires a massive leap of inductive reasoning
What’s one-shot learning?
- A kind of inductive reasoning in which a concept is learned from a single example
- This requires a massive leap of inductive reasoning
What’s the Bayesian inference?
- Some theorists have proposed that people engage (consciously or not) in this type of reasoning
- A mathematical model for updating existing beliefs, called the “prior” with new data, in order to make an educated inference
- Some theorists have proposed that many human decision-making processes are optimal from a Bayesian standpoint (El-Gamal and Grether, 1995)
What are heuristics?
- Mental shortcuts for drawing inferences based on limited information without slow deliberation
- They’re helpful -> allow us to engage in efficient decision-making
- Central for making intuitive and rapid judgments -> predictive purpose of cognition
- Generalizations that we apply when reasoning
- Another kind of inferential system
- These may allow us to skip careful deliberation of the available evidence in order to draw an inference
- Heuristic thinking is pervasive in our reasoning and decision-making
- Careful experimentation has shown that these heuristics can sometimes lead to systematic errors that could be avoided by more careful deliberation (stereotyping
and gambling addictions) - When these are over-applied, biases occur
Describe Daniel Kahneman’s work and research findings on heuristics
- He spent decades exploring heuristics and their potential impact in human decision making, a body of work that eventually won him the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002
- In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow (2017), Kahneman proposed that we employ 2 different reasoning systems under different conditions:
1. a “slow” system that engages in a serial, logical analysis of information (e.g., doing an analysis of pros and cons when making a tough decision) -> uses prefrontal cortex
2. a “fast” system that relies on heuristic shortcuts and is more akin to pattern matching than logical thought (e.g., choosing a flavor of ice cream at the shop) -> uses limbic system
In one of the first examples of heuristic thinking, Kahneman and Tversky showed that there is what kind of heuristic?
An availability heuristic
What’s an availability heuristic?
- Availability: estimate the probability of an event based on the ease at which it can be brought to mind
- A tendency to rely on information that quickly comes to mind when trying to make a decision
- We confuse the availability of something in our memory with how frequently it occurs
- The easier it is to remember something, the more likely you’ll think it is to happen in the future
- Memory-based bias
- Ex: Because car crashes occur so often, we don’t tend to see them on the news as much so we tend to overestimate the likelihood of a plane crash over a car accident
Describe Kahneman and Tversky’s study on the availability heuristic
- They asked participants “Are there more words that begin with the letter K or more words with K as the third letter?”
- Most participants thought words starting with K were more common, despite the fact that there are typically twice as many words with K in the third position as there are words that start with K
- Tversky and Kahneman argued that this error arose from the fact that it’s easier to generate examples of words that start with K than words in which it is the third letter
- Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated a number of other examples of this heuristic as well and it has now been replicated many times
The availability heuristic has been proposed as an important mechanism for what?
The availability heuristic has been proposed as an important mechanism in how people assess risk, with potentially profound implications on people’s behaviors and even public policy
Describe Sarah Lichtenstein et al. (1978) study investigating people’s assessment of the risk of death from various causes
- They conducted a seminal study investigating people’s assessment of the risk of death from various causes
- Participants were presented with pairs of potential causes of death (e.g., auto accident versus drowning) and were asked to decide which was more prevalent (drowning, in this case, by a factor of 5)
- The researchers found that for certain causes of death, people were way off
- Ex: more than 1/2 of participants rated tornadoes to be a greater cause of death than asthma when, in fact, asthma kills 20x more people than tornadoes
- Lichtenstein concluded that people’s assessments were often based on 2 factors:
1. whether they personally knew anyone who had experienced the cause of death
2. the prevalence of stories about the causes of death in the media - Demonstrates the availability heuristic
Combs (1979) study confirmed that newspapers were much more likely to report what kind of causes of death?
Newspapers were much more likely to report sensational causes of death, such as homicide, compared with less exciting but more prevalent causes, such as heart disease or cancer
What did Riddle (2010) find about violence and media?
Riddle (2010) found that people who were exposed to violent media rated violence to be more prevalent
What’s the affect heuristic?
- A reasoning heuristic consisting of a tendency for people to overestimate the risk of events that generate a strong emotional reaction, such as dread
- Slovic et al. (2002) found that the more a particular risk generated a sense of dread, the more prevalent it was rated
- This may help explain why people are often more fearful of sharks (which account for a vanishingly small number of deaths a year) than they are of drowning (which unfortunately leads to far more deaths)
What can the combination of the availability and affect heuristics potentially lead to?
- It can potentially lead to severe distortions in our assessment of risk in some cases
- Perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of this is the focus on violent mass attacks, such as terrorism
- Despite the sometimes spectacular nature of these events, they are exceedingly rare, and the likelihood of dying from a foreign terrorist attack in the US is minuscule
- However, these events tend to generate a great deal of media attention and dread, leading to a double-whammy of availability and affect heuristics
- Ex: after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the use of air travel declined severely for many months
- However, despite these attacks, air travel was and remains much safer than travel by car
- Gigerenzer (2004) calculated that more people lost their lives on the road by avoiding flying after 9/11 than the total number of passengers killed on the 4 fatal flights
As you watch TV, you may encounter a commercial in which a product’s price is being presented. Rather than just telling you how much it costs, the announcer may say something like: “How much would you pay? $200… how about $150…if you call now, we’ll give it to you for the amazing price of just…” This sales technique is based on what heuristic?
Anchoring
What’s anchoring?
- A reasoning heuristic in which people tend to focus and rely on initial pieces of information
- People’s judgments of the magnitude of something is biased (i.e. adjusted) by some initial value they are exposed to (i.e., the anchor)
- Ex: Which of the following produces a larger number?
8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1
1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8 - Most say the first sequence because it has a higher anchor, but these are the same
- Ex: participants given a random number from 0-100
- “Is this number higher or lower than the % of African nations in the United Nations?”
- Estimate the actual %
- Those who were given a HIGH random number gave greater % estimates than those given a LOW random number
- We even anchor estimates to unrelated information
Describe Tversky and Kahneman (1974) study on the anchoring heuristic
- They first had participants watch a roulette wheel that was fixed to land on a high or low number
- Afterward, participants were asked to make an estimate about a question they were likely to have little knowledge of: the percentage of United Nations countries that come from Africa
- They found that people who had seen higher roulette numbers estimated the number of African nations to be higher than those who saw a lower number
Describe Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) study on the anchroing heuristic
- They asked participants to name the last 2 digits of their social security number
- They found that the numbers correlated with the price people were willing to pay for items in an online auction
Describe the study by Eroglu, (2010) on the anchoring heuristic
He found that people whose personality is more prone to trusting others (scoring high in the agreeableness personality factor) are more susceptible to the anchoring heuristic
Sales tactics may sometimes rely on what heuristic?
On the anchoring heuristic, naming an initial price as an artificial starting point for negotiations
What’s the representativeness heuristic?
- A heuristic in which people rely on a person or object they are trying to make a decision about conforming to a specific category while neglecting other types of information or reasoning
- Probability that an item (person, object, event) is a member of a category because it resembles that category (group membership due to similarity)
- We tend to make inferences on the basis that small samples resemble the larger population they were drawn from
- Related to over-use of schemas, and other preexisting knowledge structures -> overuse of this bias can lead you to ignore important information
- Results in stereotyping, base-rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy
- Ex: you assume that all the Chris actors behave the same because they look the same
Describe the 1973 study by Kahneman and Tversky on the representativeness heuristic
- They presented participants with the description of a young woman named Linda
- This was followed by a list of statements that participants were asked to rank as being probable or improbable
- When doing this task, 85% of Tversky and Kahneman’s participants engaged in the conjunction fallacy
- According to Tversky and Kahneman, people seek out information that they believe is relevant to a specific category at the expense of other information
- Ex: participants rated “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement” as more probable than “Linda is a bank teller” (conjunction fallacy)
What’s the conjunction fallacy?
- An error in logic in which there’s a false belief that the conjunction of 2 conditions is more likely than either single condition
- Ex: Linda the feminist Bank Teller
- Because the description was more representative of both categories people think the
conjunction is the most likely label than either one
Describe Kahneman and Tversky (1982) study on the base-rate fallacy
- They conducted a study in which they first presented participants with the following information:
“ There has been a hit-and-run accident at night involving a taxi cab. An eyewitness identified the taxi cab as being blue. There are 2 taxi companies operating in the city. One has green cabs, which make up 85% of all the cabs in the city. The other company has blue cabs, making up the remaining 15% of taxis. The court tested the eyewitness under similar night time conditions and the witness correctly identified the color of cab 80% of the time” - They then asked participants “What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was blue?”
- The majority of participants in the study guessed above 50%
- Kahneman and Tversky found, people often do not do the math when considering these kinds of problems and instead rely on heuristics that can lead to the wrong conclusion
What’s the base-rate fallacy (or base-rate neglect)?
- An error in reasoning in which people ignore the underlying probability of an event (the base-rate) to judge the likelihood of an event
- This may be thought of as ignoring the prior in a Bayesian framework
Describe Ross et al. (1975) study on the confirmation bias
- They presented participants with sets of suicide notes that the experimenters told the participants were a mix of examples, 1/2 of which were real and 1/2 of which were fake
- The participants were tasked with determining which were which
- After making their selections, the participants were given their “results” (which were actually manufactured by the experimenters), including several who were told that they had an exceptional ability to tell the difference, getting 96% right, while others were told they were very poor, only getting 40% (less than chance) correct
- In the next stage of the experiment, the experimenters “debriefed” the participants, telling them that their results had been manufactured and were not related to how they had actually done
- They then asked the participants to assess how well they thought they actually compared to average performance
- Those who had initially been told they had done very well now guessed they had done better than average, while those who had been told they had done poorly guessed they did worse than average
- Once they came to believe something about their abilities, they largely ignored or discounted the new information that the original evidence was wrong to begin with
What’s cultural cognition?
A tendency for people to hold beliefs about risk that are consistent with their broader social and moral values
Describe Kahan et al.’s (2007) study on cultural cognition
- They asked participant’s their views on several hot topic issues including:
1. Whether human activity is causing climate change
2. Whether nuclear energy production is safe - The participants also participated in surveys that were designed to measure certain cultural worldviews, such as whether they approve of some groups (gender, racial, or class) having higher status than others (hierarchical) versus an emphasis on equality across groups (egalitarian) as well as whether they believed people should be largely responsible for themselves (individualism) or for one another (communitarianism)
- They found a strong correlation between cultural viewpoint and beliefs about risk and mitigation
- Those with more hierarchical and individualistic views tended to consider climate change a smaller risk, and nuclear energy production a higher risk, than those with more egalitarian/communitarian views
- People’s values were strongly correlated with their perceptions of risk
Describe Kahan et al.’s (2010) follow-up study on cultural cognition
- They asked participants to assess the scientific consensus on the issues from their first study, rather than reporting their own views on the underlying issue
- In this case, there’s no real controversy as to what the facts are -> within the scientific community there’s consensus that the evidence supports that human activity is a major contributor to climate change and consensus that nuclear energy is safe
- Nevertheless, the researchers found that participants’ beliefs about consensus followed their own worldviews
- Those with hierarchical viewpoints reported that the scientific consensus was that climate change was not caused by humans (which is incorrect) and that nuclear power is safe (which is correct), while those with more egalitarian views reported the opposite
- Both groups were wrong on one of the issues but both groups stuck to their worldviews in forming their assessments
Research like the ones on cultural cognition have led some theorists to come to what conclusion?
- That the dissemination of knowledge and expert opinion alone is not likely to change opinions on highly emotional issues
- A number of recent studies suggest that not only do people tend to ignore information that contradicts their views, encountering such information may lead people to become more entrenched in their viewpoints
Describe Nyhan and Reifler (2010) study on cultural cognition
- They had participants read mock news articles that contained a misleading claim from a politician that conformed to the participant’s political beliefs
- They compared this to a different group that also read a misleading claim consistent with their views, this time followed by a factual correction
- They then queried participants on whether they believed the content of the misleading claim and found that those who had received the correction actually reported a higher belief than those who had not received the correction
Describe Tali Sharot (2011) study on people’s predictions of their life events
- She assessed people’s predictions about what kinds of events were likely to happen to them, and found that people tend to overestimate the likelihood of positive events, such as job success and positive family outcomes
- Had them rate the likelihood a positive, negative, neutral events will happen to that person in the next month
- After a month, provide ratings of whether the events occurred
- Found that people overestimate the number of positive predicted events
-This bias may be beneficial in some cases, as it makes us more confident, which may encourage us to attempt things that we may not do if we had a firmer grasp of the odds - However, there’s a potential flip side to this bias as well as people may engage in risky behavior while underestimating the potential for a bad outcome
- Optimism bias
Describe the recent study by Toby Wise and colleagues (2020) of behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic
- They found that during the first week of the pandemic, Americans tended to underestimate their likelihood of being infected relative to the general population -> example of the optimism bias
- People’s assessment of how likely they were to be infected was predictive of how likely they were to take preventative measures, such as hand washing and social distancing
- Too much optimism can be a dangerous thing, both to the optimist and those around them
What’s the difference between reasoning and decision-making?
- Reasoning is determining what you believe, while decision-making is choosing what to do about it
- The processes of reasoning allow us to determine what we think is true about the world
- Decision-making consists of choosing actions, based on the conclusions of reasoning
Expected utility theory predicts that people should make the decision that does what?
- Maximizes value
- From a purely economic standpoint, the value something has to an individual depends entirely on the benefit the person would be expected to derive from it
- Psychologists have shown that people are prone to choices that are systematically suboptimal from an economic standpoint
- These cognitive biases occur when people assign value differently depending on factors that are not based on the potential benefit but other, seemingly extraneous, considerations
What’s one of the most prominent examples of a cognitive bias?
Loss aversion
What’s loss aversion?
- First described by Kahneman and Tversky (1979)
- A tendency of people to prefer avoiding losing something as compared with not gaining something of equal value
- Ex: people avoid gambles (choices) when they are equally likely to either lose a smaller amount $10 or win a larger amount $15
Suppose someone offers to flip a coin: If it lands on heads, they will give you $21, but if it lands on tails, you have to give them $20. According to the expected utility theory, is this gamble worth taking? Why?
- According to the expected utility theory, this is a gamble worth taking since, on average, you will win more than you lose
- The expected value dictates that you should take the bet
- However, for most people, the amount you can win has to be almost double what you could stand to lose (loss aversion)
What’s the endowment effect?
- A tendency for people to place a higher value on objects they already own over those that they don’t yet own
- Once ownership is established, people are averse to give it up
Describe the study by Knetsch (1989) on the endowment effect
- He observed how much people value gifts they have already received vs those they could receive
- Participants in his experiment were divided into 3 groups
- One of them was presented with a coffee mug at the beginning of the experiment, one group received a fancy chocolate bar (of about the same monetary value), and the third received no gift
- Next, the participants were given a choice: Do they actually want either the coffee mug or the chocolate bar
- For those who had already received items, this meant that they could either keep the gift they had or trade it for the other choice
- The group who had not received anything served as a control to see how people chose without first receiving something
- The results showed that for those who didn’t receive any gift, the split was fairly even between the mug and chocolate bar
- However, for those who received either a mug or chocolate bar initially, there was a very strong tendency to keep the item they had already received rather than trade it for the other -> people valued the item they received more highly just because they had received it
What’s the Ikea effect?
A tendency for people to place a higher value on objects they built/created themselves vs those that others built (items they bought or were given)
Describe Norton et al. (2011) study on the Ikea effect
- They had participants assemble IKEA furniture, folded origami, and build LEGO creations
- The researcher then built copies of the same items
- They found that participants were willing to pay more money for the items that they had assembled compared with those assembled by the experimenters
What’s the status quo bias?
A tendency for people to leave things as they currently are rather than making a change
Describe Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) study on the status quo bias
- They presented participants with different versions of a scenario in which they had been left an inheritance by a great uncle
- In some cases, they inherited cash while in others they inherited specific investments
- The participants were then asked what actions they would take with the inheritance
- The researchers found that there was a strong tendency to maintain the investments they had inherited rather than to make other purchases with the funds
TRUE OR FALSE: numerous studies have found that people tend to favor options that are presented in a negative, rather than positive, fashion
FALSE: numerous studies have found that people tend to favor options that are presented in a positive, rather than negative, fashion
Describe Kahneman and Tversky (1978) study on the framing effects
- They presented participants with a hypothetical scenario in which a disease was expected to kill 600 people
- Participants were presented with 2 possible intervention programs and asked to choose one
- Program A: 200 people will be saved (positive framing)
- Program B: 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved (negative framing)
- 72% of participants chose Program A over Program B
- Participants were also asked to choose between the following 2 programs:
- Program C: 400 people will die
- Program D: 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and a 2/3 probability that 600 people will die
- 78% of participants chose Program D over Program C
- Both sets of choices are actually identical
What do framing effects affect?
The effect is so powerful, it not only affects the act of decision making, but even how people experience the effects of these decisions after they have made them
Describe Levin and Gaeth (1988) study on framing effects
- They presented consumers with ground beef that was either “75% lean” or “25% fat”
- Consumers viewed the “75% lean” more positively than the “25% fat”
- The consumers also got to eat the ground meat and rate its quality
- The results were that the meat described as 75% lean was reported as actually tasting better than the one described as 25% fat
- Framing goes very deep in the way people perceive and process information
What factors impact decision-making?
- The context of economic value (ex: how much will people pay for a given item)
- People often also choose actions based on the expectation of non-economic rewards (ex: love, fun, or anger)
- The emotional state someone is in can often make a huge difference in their choices (ex: when people are highly emotionally aroused, they can do things they wouldn’t normally do, from dropping on a knee to spontaneously propose to committing a violent act -> crimes of passion, acts of violence committed in the heat of the moment)
What are the 2 basic types of emotional factors in decision making?
- Integral emotions
- Incidental emotions
What are integral emotions?
- Emotions that are directly related to a decision
- Ex: we might feel anxious about going skydiving, or we may feel excited about approaching someone to ask them on a date
- These emotions may influence the decision of whether to “take the leap” in either case
- While integral emotions often play an obviously useful role in decision making, it may sometimes lead to less-than-optimal choices
What are incidental emotions?
- Emotions that aren’t directly related to the decision under consideration, but that happen to be the state of the person at the time they are making the decision
- Ex: after someone has had a breakup and is sad, they may make the rash decision to down an entire carton of chocolate ice cream
- Ex: “retail therapy” where people in a negative mood are more likely to purchase retail goods than those in a positive mood
- Interestingly, this form of “therapy” appears to work
Describe Atalay and Meloy (2011) study on retail therapy
- They conducted a study on people’s purchasing behaviors during a trip to the mall
- They found that people who were in a more negative mood were more likely to engage in an unplanned purchase of a treat item
- They also found that such a purchase had a lasting positive effect on the person’s mood afterwards
Describe Jennifer Lerner and colleagues (2004) experimental assessment on the role of incidental emotions
- They assessed what would happen to people’s purchasing and selling behaviors when certain emotions were elicited before they made the decision
- Participants in the “sell” condition were given a free highlighter set at the beginning of the experiment while those in the “choice” condition were not initially given the free gift
- All the participants were shown one of 3 videos: one that elicits disgust, one that elicits sadness, and one that was emotionally neutral
- Afterwards, the participants in the sell condition were asked to decide how much they would be willing to sell the highlighter set back to the lab
- Those in the choice condition were given an option to either receive the highlighter set or accept a certain amount of money instead
- Participants that were shown the disgust video were willing to sell and buy at the lowest price overall, presumably reflecting their distaste for anything (including a highlighter set) when they were in a disgusted mood
- Those who saw a sad video were willing to pay more than the other conditions to get the set
- Those in the sell condition were willing to sell the item at a lower price
- The researchers proposed that when people are in a negative mood, they are more motivated to change something
- If you already own something, this would incentivize you to get rid of it, while if you didn’t own it yet, it would incentivize you to buy it
- These results are related to the retail therapy phenomenon and demonstrate the pervasive role that incidental emotions can play in decision-making behavior
What’s the Ultimatum Game
- First introduced by Guth et al. (1982)
- An experimental paradigm in which 2 people, a proposer and responder, split a pot of money
- The game typically involves 2 people (usually strangers), who are told that they will be given the opportunity to split a pot of money, often 10$
- One of the participants is designated the proposer while the other is the responder
- The proposer is given first dibs on how to split the total pot of money while the responder can choose to accept this proposal or reject it
- In case of rejection, neither player receives anything
- Most responders will reject offers that are below a 7:3 split (7$ for the proposer and 3 for the responder)
- The responders find the lowball offers so unfair that they are willing to forego a payoff just to punish the proposer
- This makes no sense from the standpoint of expected utility theory
- This shows the role that strong emotions, like outrage at a raw deal, can play in decision making
What does rational economic decision making dictate the responder should do in the ultimatum game?
That the responder should accept any offer the proposer makes; even a small amount of money is better than nothing
What’s the final stage of cognitive processing?
- Decision-making
- Therefore, it involves all of the regions of the brain that precede it including those devoted to sensation, perception, attention, and short-term and long-term memory
What regions in the brain seem to be involved in emotional processing related to decision making?
- ## The prefrontal cortex and more specifically the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Describe the case of Phineas Gage
A railroad worker who received damage to his frontal lobe and became a changed person -> from mild mannered and quiet to angry and disorderly
Describe the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in decision-making
- Bilateral lesions of the vmPFC lead to what may be described as a kind of decision-making myopia in which the individual doesn’t seem to take into account the long-term outcomes of a decision
- People with vmPFC damage are able to reason about morally and socially appropriate behaviors, but often don’t actually select these behaviors when faced with a choice
Describe Bechara et al. (2000) study on the role of the vmPFC on decision-making
They found that people with vmPFC damage who were playing a card gambling game often chose strategies that led to short-term gains but long-term overall losses—even though they could understand that this was not the optimal choice—while those without such damage tended to choose the longer-term gains
What does the somatic marker hypothesis, influential theory by neuroscientist Antonio DeMasio, state about the vmPFC’s role in decision-making?
- That the vmPFC is involved in associating emotional reactions (like elevated heart-rate or skin galvanization) with certain behaviors
- According to this theory, when people are faced with a complex and potentially fraught decision, they may recruit the vmPFC to elicit emotional responses that might occur based on the outcome of the decision
- Ex: someone who’s considering a very risky decision will often experience feelings of anxiety that may be seen as predictive of the possible harm that could come from a bad choice
- This physiological anxiety then serves as an integral emotion that will influence the behavioral decision
- When the vmPFC is damaged, this circuit may be broken and therefore these predictive emotional responses are stunted or nonexistent, leading to riskier, more rash behaviors
What region of the brain appears to be critical in the ability of people to delay gratification?
The prefrontal cortex appears to be critical in the ability of people to delay gratification -> to put off a reward in the near term for a greater reward in the longer term
Describe the classic study by Mischel and Ebbesen called the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment
- They presented children with a choice: they could have 1 treat (either a marshmallow or pretzel stick) right now or 2 treats if they waited until the experimenter returned 15 mins later
- They found that the presence of the marshmallow in the room created a great deal of anxiety as some of the children tried to avoid eating it
- Some made up songs, others covered their faces, while one even went to sleep!
- Some of the children, however, couldn’t wait and ate the marshmallow before the experimenter came back
Describe the follow-up studies’ findings on Mischel and Ebbesen’s Stanford Marshmallow Experiment
- Researchers tracked down the original cohort of children as adolescents and found that their cognitive and academic performance (such as SAT scores), as well as their ability to cope with frustration and stress, was positively correlated with their ability to wait for the second marshmallow in the original test
- Another follow up found that those who had been able to delay gratification as kids showed lower levels of aggression and rejection by peers as well as reduced drug use as adults (Ayduk et al., 2000)
- In another follow-up study, researchers retested the same cohort again, this time using brain imaging while the participants performed a go/no-go task in which they had to respond to a stimulus on certain trials while not responding on others (Casey et al., 2011)
- They found that the prefrontal cortex was more highly activated on the no-go trials in those participants who had been able to resist the marshmallow some 40 years prior
- However, the idea, popularized by these experiments, that people’s lifelong willpower is hardwired into the brain at childhood has recently been questioned
Describe the 2018 study by Watts and colleagues examining adolescents who had participated in a version of the marshmallow test as children
- They examined a large cohort of almost a thousand adolescents who had participated in a version of the marshmallow test as children
- While they replicated the positive correlation between waiting times and academic and social skills, the effects they found were smaller than earlier studies and— critically—could mostly be accounted for by family background, intelligence and the environment in the home
- Thus, the ability to delay gratification appears to be a mix of neurological and environmental factors
Intelligence is correlated with what characteristic of the prefrontal cortex?
It’s correlated with volume of the prefrontal cortex
TRUE OR FALSE: humans are always rational in their decision-making behavior
FALSE: Humans are not all that rational in our decision-making behavior
- Instead, our choices can depend on many, seemingly irrelevant factors such as framing, mood, associations, and misperceptions
Who takes advantage of the fact that human’s decision-making isn’t always rational and often depends on irrelevant factors?
- Advertisers and marketers
- They use this knowledge in their daily work , whether it’s setting prices, designing labels or advertisements or placing products on shelves
What’s the nudge theory?
- A kind of applied science
- The idea was popularized by Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008)
- An approach to behavioral modification in which conditions of the environment are used to influence behavior and decision-making
- Governments and businesses across the world have used nudges to attempt to modify people’s behaviors without resorting to compulsory measures, like laws or taxes
What are some examples of the application of the nudge theory?
- Using default, or opt-out choice framing, rather than opt-in
- Using loss aversion, such as adding a surcharge for using a bag at the supermarket as opposed to a discount for bringing your own bag -> that extra nickel hurts more as a payment than it feels good as a discount
Describe Pichert and Katsikopoulos (2008) finding on the use of default or opt-out choice framing (nudge theory)
- They found that consumers chose renewable energy options when it was the default choice
- This would seem to be a manifestation of the status quo bias to leave things as they are
What are some criticisms of the nudge theory?
- Some have argued that these measures only affect temporary change while ignoring measures to make more permanent behavioral changes
- Others argue that the entire approach is too paternalistic and coercive to be ethical and is no different from the kind of social engineering employed by repressive governments
- Surveys of public opinion about nudging appear to be susceptible to the same kind of nudging they are meant to address
Describe Tannenbaum et al. (2017) study on the nudge theory and the partisan nudge bias
They found that people tended to favor the idea of nudges as long as they agreed with the policy or behavior the nudge was meant to encourage, a phenomenon the authors called “partisan nudge bias”
What’s the link between loss aversion and the amygdala?
- De Martino et al. (2010) tested patients with bilateral lesions of the amygdala
- Impairments in processing fear despite normal cognition
- Lacked loss aversion on gambling task
What form of reasoning are we engaging in when we make predictions of what will happen in our future based on what happened in our past?
Inductive reasoning
When are we not aware that we’re using inductive reasoning?
When engaging in heuristics
What could overusing inductive reasoning lead to?
Biases
What’s the difference between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning?
Inductive: specific observations -> generalizations -> theories (reasoning from information)
Deductive: theories -> predictions -> experiments (reasoning towards information)
What are the 3 basic types of syllogisms?
- All statements
(ex: all A are B) or (ex: All men are mortal…Socrates is a man…Therefore, Socrates is
a mortal) - Negative statements
(ex: no A is a B OR no B is A) or (ex: all psychology professors have PhDs…No PhD holders are human…Therefore, psychology
professors are not human) - Some statements
(ex: some A are B or “At least one, possibly all”) or (ex: no provinces with coastlines are provinces that are landlocked…some provinces are are landlocked…therefore, some provinces are not states with coastlines)
What’s the omission bias?
- Biased thought that ”withholding is not as bad as doing”
- Inaction is harder to classify as wrong than action
- Ex: which is more immoral?
1. A person who accidentally sets fire to a building
2. A person who sees a fire in a building but doesn’t bother to report it - People tend to react more to strongly to harmful actions than to harmful inactions
- Example of what not being able to imagine negative statements could lead to
- Link with trolley problem
People with what kind of damage don’t engage with the moral dilemma of the trolley problem as much?
Frontal lobe damage
How to test if the conditional statement “If it is raining, I will get wet” is valid?
Ask yourself:
* What happens if Q is true? If I am wet, is it raining?
* What happens if P is false? If it isn’t raining, am I wet?
* What happens if Q is false? If I am not wet, is it raining?
What’s the falsification principle of conditional reasoning?
- You need to look for situations that would falsify a rule
- Ex:
- General logical rule to solve:
“ If P then Q ” - Choose the P card (is there a not-Q on the back?) and the not-Q card (is there a P on the back?)
- Eliminate false statements
What are the 3 categories for how heuristics lead to bias?
- Heuristics that bias how we interpret information
- Heuristics that bias how we judge frequency (how often something happens)
- Heuristics that bias how we make predictions
What are biases?
- Systematically inaccurate choices that don’t reflect a
current situation - Deviations from rationality (errors) that are caused by using heuristics
What does the following scenario represent:
You randomly select one male from the Canadian population and that male, Adam, wears glasses, speaks quietly and reads a lot. It is more likely Adam is a farmer or a librarian? Most people say librarian
- This choice is a result of representative bias and leads to base rate neglect: ignore important rate information
when reasoning - There are more farmers than librarians in Canada
Explain how the availability heuristic can play into how we view our personal challenges vs other people’s challenges
- We can remember challenges we had to overcome better than other people’s challenges
- Our challenges are more available from memory
- We perceive things as harder for us compared to others
- Ex:
- Both Democrats and Republicans think the electoral maps works against their party
- Siblings think parents were harder on them than their sister/brother
What are illusory correlations?
- Linking 2 co-occurring events and assuming a relationship
- People tend to see causal relationships even when there are none
- An illusory correlation if outcomes are over- emphasized
- Ex: a person wins bingo with a troll doll, so they always play with that troll doll
- Growing a play-off beard to bring a win
What’s the Gambler’s fallacy?
- The false belief that a predicted outcome of an independent event depends on past outcomes
- We assume outcomes are linked when they are random
- A coin flip lands heads 3x in a row
- What are the odds that it will be heads on the next toss?
- 50-50, but there’s a misperception that a ’tails’ must be coming
- Thinking one is due for a ‘win’ after a run of ‘losses’
What are examples of Gambler’s fallacy in the real world?
- People continue to invest after several losses on the stock market
- U.S. judges in refugee asylum cases are more likely to deny (grant) asylum after granting (denying) asylum to the previous applicant
- Loan officers are more likely to deny a loan application after approving the previous application
What’s the hot-hand belief?
- Thinking that a person who experiences success will keep having success,
- ‘A winning streak’
- Ask basketball fans about player’s shooting abilities
- 91% fans thought that a player is more likely to make a shot after making 2 shots than after missing a shot
- Just because something feels true, doesn’t mean it is true
In what kind of people was optimism bias not found in Sharot et al.’s study on predicting life events?
- This optimism bias wasn’t present in depression
- Presentation differs with degree of depression
What’s the difference between post-mortem and pre-mortem techniques?
- Post-mortem technique is learning from failures
- Pre-mortem technique is to anticipate and prevent our mistakes before they result in catastrophe?
Ex: - You are on the verge of making a decision
- Look ahead at challenges that could cause failure
- Create a plan to navigate those challenges
- This helps minimize the over-reliance on heuristics
Errors in what processes provide insight into underlying mechanisms of reasoning?
Heuristics and biases
What kind of psychology tests could present the anchoring heuristic?
- Likert scale
- According to anchoring heuristic, people start off with one value and adjust accordingly from there
- This is important when getting ratings from a scale because if we adjust left to right on the Likert scale, this will bias people’s responses towards the direction that the point is more heavily located towards
What’s regression toward the mean?
- When a process is somewhat random (i.e. weak correlation), extreme values will be closer to the mean (i.e. less extreme) when measured a second time
- When you’re measuring hypotheses in the real world, you’ll usually be more likely to get a weak relationship over there being no correlation at all
- Related to illusionary correlations
- Ex: A pageant mom rewards her daughter when she preforms unexpectedly well and wins a pageant. But the next pageant she comes in last place, the mom punishes her and the following competition she does well. The mom concludes punishment works better than rewards.
- Related to our understanding of the roles of reward and punishment on learning -> can’t always attribute changes in performance to manipulation….sometimes it’s just noise
What’s the bounded rationality theory of heuristics?
- People are thought to be bounded rational
- They are limited by both environmental constraints (e.g. time pressure) and individual constraints (e.g. working memory, attention)
- There’s a limitation to people’s cognitive capacities limited by environmental constraints and individual constraints
- People are hence also satisficers
- We look for solutions that are “good enough” -> heuristics
- “Making do” with the limitations we have as humans
- Although heuristics sometimes provide incorrect answers and lead to biases; they also work
What’s the ecological rationality theory of heuristics?
- Gigerenzer proposed this alternative view to heuristics which sees heuristics not as a “good enough” approach to solving a problem but as the optimal approach
- While previous views on heuristics drew a separation between how we should act and how we do act, Ecological rationality doesn’t distinguish these 2
- Given the right environment, a heuristic can be better than optimization or other complex strategies
- Because you’re using a heuristic, you can come up with a solution much quicker
What’s an example of the ecological rationality theory of heuristics?
- Say you have some money you want to invest and a bunch of options to choose from, but limited information about how risky each one is or the past performance…
- Equally dividing your assets (money) among the options (1/N heuristic) has been shown to provide better results than other more complex optimization algorithms
What are some examples of types of heuristics?
- Availability
- Representativeness
- Anchoring and adjustment
- Regression towards the Mean
What’s Perceptual Decision Making?
- Objective (externally defined) criterion for making your choice
- Ex: Are the dots moving left or right? Or is the dress black and blue or white and gold?
What are the 2 types of decision-making?
- Perceptual Decision Making
- Value-based Decision making
What’s Value-based Decision making?
- Subjective (internally defined) criterion for making your choice
- Ex: Do I want cake or ice cream for dessert?
- Depends on motivational state and goal
- These are difficult to study because they depend on personal motivational state and goal
- There’s usually risk tied with this
What’s risk?
- Taking an action despite the outcome being uncertain
- Specific to Value-based decision making
What’s ambiguity?
When you have incomplete information about the consequences
How could risks be framed?
As Gains or Losses
Describe risky decision-making
- It is adaptive to be able to make decisions when there is risk
- Most people are risk averse
- Extremes in risk taking (high or low) can be very harmful:
- Stagnant living
- Addiction and impulsivity
What are the different risk attitude profiles?
¤ Risk premium: difference between expected gains of a risky option and a certain option
¤ Risk averse: decision maker has positive risk premium
- Need a chance at winning a lot more than a certain option to select the risky option
¤ Risk neutral: decision maker has 0 risk premium
- No difference in the options
¤ Risk seeking: decision maker has negative risk premium
- Doesn’t need the chance at winning more than the certain option to gamble
Describe risk preferences
- Risk preferences are not themselves irrational
¤ Classic (rational) economic theories (Expected Utility theory) can account for individuals’ risk
preferences -> according to this theory having inconsistent risk-taking can be considered irrational behaviour
¤ However, it has been empirically observed that people are inconsistent in their preferences which has been taken as a bias
¤ These inconsistencies cannot be explained using classical economic theories (How should people act?)
¤ Birth of Behavioural Economics: How do people act? -> Born from the inconsistencies between how people should act and how they do act
What effect does this scenario represent:
Imagine that the country is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual rare disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. 2 alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Which program would you choose?
¤ If Program A is adopted, 200 lives being saved.
¤ If Program B is adopted, there is a 1 in 3 probability of saving 600 lives and a 2 in 3 probability of saving no lives.
Framing effect -> for gains
What effect does this scenario represent: Imagine that the country is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual rare disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. 2 alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Which program would you choose?
¤ If Program C is adopted, exactly 400 people will die.
¤ If Program D is adopted, there is a 1 in 3 probability that nobody will die and a 2 in 3 probability that all 600 will die.
Framing effect -> loss
Describe the framing effect of gains vs loss
¤ Inconsistent Risk preference depending on the framing (loss vs gains) of the problem
¤ People are risk-averse when the options are described as gains
- They prefer the sure thing and go for safety
- The cup is half full – do I need more?
- People are risk-seeking when the options are described as losses
- They can tolerate an uncertain thing and risk a loss
- The cup half empty – don’t take any more away!
Give a real-life example of the framing effect of gains vs loss
¤ At an economics conference, PhD students either got:
- An Early bird discount
- Or a late registration penalty fee
¤ 93 % of students signed-up early when they were told they would pay a penalty fee
¤ But only 67% signed-up early when told they would get a discount
What’s the prospect theory?
¤ Birth of Behavioural Economics (Kahneman & Tversky 1979, 1992)
¤ 2 major contributions:
- Shape of Utility function (losses vs Gains)
- Shape of Probability Weighting function (Unlikely vs Likely events)
¤ Describes how people do act; not how people should act
Describe the Fourfold Pattern of Prospect Theory
- High probability for losses = Risk seeking (horror movie logic)
- High probability for gains = Risk averse (salary/jobs)
- Low probability for losses = Risk averse (insurance)
- Low probability for gains = Risk seeking (lottery tickets)
