Final Material

Question 1

What’s one of the major barriers to problem solving?

Answer 1

Being unable to ignore irrelevant information

Question 2

What’s problem solving?

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

What’s the goal of problem solving?

Answer 3

The goal is to overcome barriers and find a solution that best resolves the problem

Question 4

What’s a problem?

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

What are the mental processes that go into problem solving?

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Why is problem solving considered a cyclical, recursive, and applicable
process?

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

According to Pertz et al. (2003), the problem solving cycle consists of what steps?

Answer 7

1. Recognize or identify the problem
2. Define and represent the problem mentally
3. Develop a solution strategy
4. Organize knowledge about the problem
5. Allocate mental and physical resources for solving the problem
6. Monitor progress toward the goal
7. Evaluate the solution for accuracy

Question 8

What does every model describing the process of problem solving have in common?

Answer 8

An initial state and a goal state

Question 9

What’s the initial state of a problem?

Answer 9

In problem solving, it’s the initial situation or starting point of a problem

Question 10

What’s the goal state of a problem?

Answer 10

In problem solving, it’s the desired final state or ending situation

Question 11

Describe the problem space theory model (Newell & Simon, 1972)

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

What are the intermediate states of a problem?

Answer 12

All the possible states in between each step in moving from an initial state to a goal state

Question 13

What are operators?

Answer 13

Actions that transform the current problem state into another problem state

Question 14

How do the most effective problem solvers and experts approach problems?

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

What are problem-solving questions compared to?

Answer 15

Visual illusions

Question 16

What are the 2 main types of problems?

Answer 16

• Well-defined problems
• Ill-defined problems

Question 17

What’s a well-defined problem?

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

What are algorithms?

Answer 18

A step-by-step procedure that should always produce a correct solution

Question 19

We can use well-defined problems and computer simulations to study what?

Answer 19

• 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

Question 20

What’s an ill-defined problem?

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

What did Anderson (1985) state about problem-solving?

Answer 21

“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”

Question 22

What are the 2 main theories describing how we approach problem solving?

Answer 22

• Behaviourist approach
• Gestalt approach

Question 23

Describe the behaviourist theory of how we approach problem solving

Answer 23

• 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

Question 24

What was Edward Thorndike’s perspective on how we approach problem solving?

Answer 24

• 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

Question 25

How did Edward Thorndike experiment on the behaviourist view of problem-solving?

Answer 25

• 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

Question 26

What’s the reproductive process?

Answer 26

• 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

Question 27

What’s trial-and-error?

Answer 27

• 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

Question 28

Describe Thorndike’s theory of the Law of Effect

Answer 28

• 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

Question 29

Describe the Gestalt theory of how we approach problem solving

Answer 29

• 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

Question 30

How did Max Wertheimer (1959), one of the founders of the Gestalt approach, describe the difference between reproductive and productive thinking?

Answer 30

While the reproductive process uses previous knowledge and a trial-and-error strategy, it doesn’t explain phenomena such as insight

Question 31

What’s insight?

Answer 31

• 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

Question 32

Describe the productive process of problem-solving

Answer 32

• 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

Question 33

What are heuristics?

Answer 33

• 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

Question 34

The likelihood of using a type of heuristic increases when one of the following conditions is met….

Answer 34

• 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.

Question 35

When it comes to solving problems, rather than waste time and processing power, we regularly take mental shortcuts by using what?

Answer 35

Heuristics

Question 36

What’s working backwards?

Answer 36

• 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

Question 37

Give an example of the working backwards heuristic

Answer 37

• 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

Question 38

What’s the means-end analysis?

Answer 38

• 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

Question 39

What are some barriers to problem-solving?

Answer 39

1. Being unable to ignore irrelevant information
2. The tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use -> functional fixedness
3. Heuristics -> which can prevent us from considering information that may be important

Question 40

Describe the “being unable to ignore irrelevant information” barrier to problem-solving

Answer 40

• 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

Question 41

Describe the functional fixedness barrier to problem-solving

Answer 41

• 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

Question 42

People tend to focus on what, which inhibits them from arriving at a solution?

Answer 42

People tend to focus on a specific characteristic of a problem, a fixation, which inhibits them from arriving at a solution

Question 43

What’s a fixation?

Answer 43

The tendency to focus on a specific characteristic of a problem

Question 44

What’s an insight problem?

Answer 44

A problem in which the solution occurs suddenly into your consciousness

Question 45

What’s a non-insight problem?

Answer 45

A problem distinguished by the process of consciously working through each step of a problem to arrive at a solution

Question 46

Describe Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) study on whether there’s a difference between solving different types of problems

Answer 46

• 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

Question 47

Describe Maier’s (1931) findings on solving problems that demonstrate insight when hints to the correct solution were provided

Answer 47

• 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

Question 48

What is creativity often associated with?

Answer 48

Divergent thinking

Question 49

Describe Guilford’s (1967) ideas about divergent thinking

Answer 49

• 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

Question 50

What’s convergent thinking?

Answer 50

Convergent thinking usually leads to conventional solutions rather than coming up with many creative options

Question 51

What’s creativity?

Answer 51

Being able to produce novel ideas that are appropriate and that are relevant to the situation

Question 52

What are the 3 facets of human intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence (1977 & 1985)?

Answer 52

• Analytical
• Practical
• Creative

Question 53

What’s analytical intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence?

Answer 53

• Basic academic problem-solving skills such as solving analogies and puzzles
• This is similar to what standard IQ scores measure

Question 54

What’s practical intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence?

Answer 54

• The ability to understand and deal with everyday tasks
• AKA street smarts

Question 55

What’s creative intelligence according to Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence?

Answer 55

• 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

Question 56

What’s ideational fluency?

Answer 56

• 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

Question 57

Describe how Zirhlioglu (2012) analyzed the relationship between problem solving and creativity and what his findings were

Answer 57

• 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

Question 58

Describe the findings of Karl Duncker’s candle problem

Answer 58

• 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

Question 59

Describe the nine-dot problem (Maier, 1930)

Answer 59

• 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

Question 60

Describe Luchins (1942) water-jug problem

Answer 60

• 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

Question 61

What are mental sets?

Answer 61

• 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

Question 62

What’s the difference between experts and novices?

Answer 62

• 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

Question 63

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

Answer 63

• 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

Question 64

An expert’s ability to remember, reason, and solve problems are affected by what?

Answer 64

By the extent of their knowledge

Question 65

Describe Chase and Simon’s study on expert and novice chess players and their memory for chess arrangements

Answer 65

• 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

Question 66

What are chunks?

Answer 66

• Any combination of letters, numbers, or sounds that constitute a meaningful whole
• It’s the proposed unit for measuring capacity in STM

Question 67

Describe the expert’s approach to problem solving

Answer 67

• 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

Question 68

Why are experts stuck with conventional ways of thinking when problem-solving, as opposed to the creative thinking novices use?

Answer 68

• 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

Question 69

What’s the information processing approach?

Answer 69

• 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

Question 70

In order to solve problems, humans use heuristics while computers use what?

Answer 70

Algorithms

Question 71

Why are solutions derived from heuristics not predicable like the solutions derived from algorithms?

Answer 71

Because the solutions derived from heuristics are educated guesses and intuitive judgements that don’t always guarantee a correct solution

Question 72

What’s the difference in information processing between humans computers?

Answer 72

• 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

Question 73

What are algorithms?

Answer 73

A step-by-step procedure that should always produce a correct solution

Question 74

What’s the tower of Hanoi and what does it say about information processing in humans?

Answer 74

• 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

Question 75

How can computers be compared to humans using the information processing approach?

Answer 75

Because they both combine new, incoming information with what is already stored in memory and both have a central processor with limited capacity

Question 76

How do humans and computers differ with how they solve the tower of hanoi problem?

Answer 76

• 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

Question 77

What’s the problem-solving cycle?

Answer 77

1. Define the problem
2. Brainstorm solutions
3. Pick a solution
4. Implement the solutions
5. Review the results

Question 78

Engaging in problem solving is …

Answer 78

• Cyclical
• Recursive
• Applicable

Question 79

Why is engaging in problem-solving considered cyclical?

Answer 79

Because we enact steps that occur in a loop

Question 80

Why is engaging in problem-solving considered recursive?

Answer 80

Because we repeat this cycle as many times as necessary to find a solution

Question 81

Why is engaging in problem-solving considered applicable?

Answer 81

Because we apply successful cycles (solutions) to new problems

Question 82

What’s an example of a well-defined problem?

Answer 82

Puzzles

Question 83

What’s an example of an ill-defined problem?

Answer 83

Broken laptop

Question 84

Describe the study by Vartanian and Goel (2005) on ill-defined and well-defined problems

Answer 84

• 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’

Question 85

What’s cognitive load?

Answer 85

The amount of information held in mind at one time

Question 86

What’s reasoning?

Answer 86

• 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

Question 87

What’s decision making?

Answer 87

• 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)

Question 88

For much of its history, research on decision making has been driven by ideas from what?

Answer 88

• Economic theory
• A cornerstone of this approach is the expected utility hypothesis (EUT)

Question 89

What’s the expected utility hypothesis (EUT)?

Answer 89

• 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

Question 90

Describe the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that put into question the expected utility hypothesis (EUT)

Answer 90

• 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

Question 91

What gave birth to the relatively new field of neuroeconomics?

Answer 91

• 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

Question 92

What’s neuroeconomics?

Answer 92

• 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

Question 93

Before we can make a decision, we first need to do what?

Answer 93

We first need to determine what information we can bring to bear on the situation based on the information we currently have -> reasoning

Question 94

The process of looking for your keys may rely on what?

Answer 94

The process of looking for your keys may rely on multiple types of reasoning

Question 95

Reasoning begins with what?

Answer 95

Reasoning begins with a set of beliefs, or premises

Question 96

What are premises?

Answer 96

An estimate about whether certain possible facts about the world, called propositions, are true

Question 97

What are propositions?

Answer 97

• 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”)

Question 98

What are the 2 basic classes of reasoning?

Answer 98

• Deduction
• Induction

Question 99

What’s deduction (deductive reasoning)?

Answer 99

• 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

Question 100

What’s induction?

Answer 100

A kind of reasoning which relies on generalizing from a certain set of information and extending it to make an informed guess

Question 101

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?

Answer 101

The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle

Question 102

Deduction is related to what field?

Answer 102

The field of logic

Question 103

Describe the field of logic

Answer 103

• 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

Question 104

What’s the most basic form of deductive reasoning studied by Aristotle?

Answer 104

The syllogism

Question 105

What’s the syllogism?

Answer 105

• 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)

Question 106

What’s the most well-known type of syllogism, actually described by Aristotle himself?

Answer 106

Categorical syllogism

Question 107

What’s categorical syllogism?

Answer 107

• 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

Question 108

Give an example of a categorical syllogism

Answer 108

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

Question 109

What’s a valid syllogism?

Answer 109

• 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

Question 110

The actual truth of the syllogism depends on what?

Answer 110

• 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

Question 111

What’s the point of syllogisms?

Answer 111

The point of syllogisms isn’t to assess the underlying truth of premises but, rather, to determine what conclusions follow from certain statements

Question 112

What are invalid syllogisms called?

Answer 112

Fallacies

Question 113

What did the highly influential developmental psychologist Jean Piaget believe about reasoning?

Answer 113

• 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

Question 114

Describe Evans (2002) study on syllogisms

Answer 114

• 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

Question 115

What’s the belief bias?

Answer 115

• 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

Question 116

What causes the belief bias?

Answer 116

• 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

Question 117

Describe Evans (2005) study on the relationship between the belief bias and time

Answer 117

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

Question 118

What’s the atmosphere effect?

Answer 118

• 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.

Question 119

What do both the belief bias and atmosphere effect suggest?

Answer 119

They suggest that people (at least people who are not logicians) don’t analyze syllogisms by simply applying the rules of logic

Question 120

What’s the influential theory, proposed by Phillip Johnson-Laird (1983), about what people are actually doing when evaluating syllogisms?

Answer 120

• 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

Question 121

What are mental models?

Answer 121

A kind of mental simulation of the world

Question 122

What’s the most heavily studied and supported theory of deductive reasoning?

Answer 122

• The mental model theory
• Although this theory has not been proven conclusively

Question 123

In the 19th century, the study of logic was expanded to include additional types of syllogisms, namely….

Answer 123

The conditional or hypothetical syllogism

Question 124

What’s the conditional (or hypothetical) syllogism?

Answer 124

• 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)

Question 125

What are the 2 valid deductions we can make with a conditional/hypothetical syllogism?

Answer 125

1. The deductive rule of modus ponens, or affirming the antecedent
2. Modus tollens or denying the consequent
   - The invalid deductions look superficially similar but are ultimately logically invalid

Question 126

What’s the deductive rule of modus ponens (or affirming the antecedent)?

Answer 126

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

Question 127

What’s the deductive rule of modus tollens (or denying the consequent)?

Answer 127

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

Question 128

What’s affirming the consequent?

Answer 128

An invalid conclusion from a conditional syllogism in which one concludes the antecedent is true because the consequent is true

Question 129

What’s denying the antecedent?

Answer 129

• 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

Question 130

How well do people do when assessing conditional syllogisms as shown in Evans (1993) study?

Answer 130

• 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%

Question 131

Describe Wason’s (1968) groundbreaking experiment investigating how people assess conditional claims, or rules

Answer 131

• 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

Question 132

What’s the key to testing a rule?

Answer 132

To check cases that have the potential to prove it wrong or falsify it

Question 133

What’s the confirmation bias?

Answer 133

• 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

Question 134

Describe Griggs and Cox (1982) version of Wason’s four-card task used to investigate how people assess conditional claims or rules

Answer 134

• 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

Question 135

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?

Answer 135

• 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

Question 136

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?

Answer 136

• 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

Question 137

What’s an induction?

Answer 137

• 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

Question 138

List different types of inductive reasoning that logicians have identified

Answer 138

• Generalization
• Statistical syllogism
• Argument from analogy

Question 139

What’s generalization?

Answer 139

• 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

Question 140

What’s statistical syllogism?

Answer 140

• 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

Question 141

What’s argument from analogy?

Answer 141

• 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

Question 142

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?

Answer 142

• 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

Question 143

What’s one-shot learning?

Answer 143

• A kind of inductive reasoning in which a concept is learned from a single example
• This requires a massive leap of inductive reasoning

Question 144

What’s the Bayesian inference?

Answer 144

• 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)

Question 145

What are heuristics?

Answer 145

• 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

Question 146

Describe Daniel Kahneman’s work and research findings on heuristics

Answer 146

• 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

Question 147

In one of the first examples of heuristic thinking, Kahneman and Tversky showed that there is what kind of heuristic?

Answer 147

An availability heuristic

Question 148

What’s an availability heuristic?

Answer 148

• 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

Question 149

Describe Kahneman and Tversky’s study on the availability heuristic

Answer 149

• 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

Question 150

The availability heuristic has been proposed as an important mechanism for what?

Answer 150

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

Question 151

Describe Sarah Lichtenstein et al. (1978) study investigating people’s assessment of the risk of death from various causes

Answer 151

• 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

Question 152

Combs (1979) study confirmed that newspapers were much more likely to report what kind of causes of death?

Answer 152

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

Question 153

What did Riddle (2010) find about violence and media?

Answer 153

Riddle (2010) found that people who were exposed to violent media rated violence to be more prevalent

Question 154

What’s the affect heuristic?

Answer 154

• 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)

Question 155

What can the combination of the availability and affect heuristics potentially lead to?

Answer 155

• 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

Question 156

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?

Answer 156

Anchoring

Question 157

What’s anchoring?

Answer 157

• 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

Question 158

Describe Tversky and Kahneman (1974) study on the anchoring heuristic

Answer 158

• 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

Question 159

Describe Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) study on the anchroing heuristic

Answer 159

• 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

Question 160

Describe the study by Eroglu, (2010) on the anchoring heuristic

Answer 160

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

Question 161

Sales tactics may sometimes rely on what heuristic?

Answer 161

On the anchoring heuristic, naming an initial price as an artificial starting point for negotiations

Question 162

What’s the representativeness heuristic?

Answer 162

• 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

Question 163

Describe the 1973 study by Kahneman and Tversky on the representativeness heuristic

Answer 163

• 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)

Question 164

What’s the conjunction fallacy?

Answer 164

• 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

Question 165

Describe Kahneman and Tversky (1982) study on the base-rate fallacy

Answer 165

• 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

Question 166

What’s the base-rate fallacy (or base-rate neglect)?

Answer 166

• 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

Question 167

Describe Ross et al. (1975) study on the confirmation bias

Answer 167

• 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

Question 168

What’s cultural cognition?

Answer 168

A tendency for people to hold beliefs about risk that are consistent with their broader social and moral values

Question 169

Describe Kahan et al.’s (2007) study on cultural cognition

Answer 169

• 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

Question 170

Describe Kahan et al.’s (2010) follow-up study on cultural cognition

Answer 170

• 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

Question 171

Research like the ones on cultural cognition have led some theorists to come to what conclusion?

Answer 171

• 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

Question 172

Describe Nyhan and Reifler (2010) study on cultural cognition

Answer 172

• 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

Question 173

Describe Tali Sharot (2011) study on people’s predictions of their life events

Answer 173

• 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

Question 174

Describe the recent study by Toby Wise and colleagues (2020) of behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic

Answer 174

• 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

Question 175

What’s the difference between reasoning and decision-making?

Answer 175

• 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

Question 176

Expected utility theory predicts that people should make the decision that does what?

Answer 176

• 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

Question 177

What’s one of the most prominent examples of a cognitive bias?

Answer 177

Loss aversion

Question 178

What’s loss aversion?

Answer 178

• 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

Question 179

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?

Answer 179

• 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)

Question 180

What’s the endowment effect?

Answer 180

• 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

Question 181

Describe the study by Knetsch (1989) on the endowment effect

Answer 181

• 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

Question 182

What’s the Ikea effect?

Answer 182

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)

Question 183

Describe Norton et al. (2011) study on the Ikea effect

Answer 183

• 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

Question 184

What’s the status quo bias?

Answer 184

A tendency for people to leave things as they currently are rather than making a change

Question 185

Describe Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) study on the status quo bias

Answer 185

• 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

Question 186

TRUE OR FALSE: numerous studies have found that people tend to favor options that are presented in a negative, rather than positive, fashion

Answer 186

FALSE: numerous studies have found that people tend to favor options that are presented in a positive, rather than negative, fashion

Question 187

Describe Kahneman and Tversky (1978) study on the framing effects

Answer 187

• 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

Question 188

What do framing effects affect?

Answer 188

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

Question 189

Describe Levin and Gaeth (1988) study on framing effects

Answer 189

• 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

Question 190

What factors impact decision-making?

Answer 190

• 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)

Question 191

What are the 2 basic types of emotional factors in decision making?

Answer 191

• Integral emotions
• Incidental emotions

Question 192

What are integral emotions?

Answer 192

• 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

Question 193

What are incidental emotions?

Answer 193

• 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

Question 194

Describe Atalay and Meloy (2011) study on retail therapy

Answer 194

• 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

Question 195

Describe Jennifer Lerner and colleagues (2004) experimental assessment on the role of incidental emotions

Answer 195

• 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

Question 196

What’s the Ultimatum Game

Answer 196

• 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

Question 197

What does rational economic decision making dictate the responder should do in the ultimatum game?

Answer 197

That the responder should accept any offer the proposer makes; even a small amount of money is better than nothing

Question 198

What’s the final stage of cognitive processing?

Answer 198

• 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

Question 199

What regions in the brain seem to be involved in emotional processing related to decision making?

Answer 199

• ## The prefrontal cortex and more specifically the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Question 200

Describe the case of Phineas Gage

Answer 200

A railroad worker who received damage to his frontal lobe and became a changed person -> from mild mannered and quiet to angry and disorderly

Question 201

Describe the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in decision-making

Answer 201

• 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

Question 202

Describe Bechara et al. (2000) study on the role of the vmPFC on decision-making

Answer 202

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

Question 203

What does the somatic marker hypothesis, influential theory by neuroscientist Antonio DeMasio, state about the vmPFC’s role in decision-making?

Answer 203

• 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

Question 204

What region of the brain appears to be critical in the ability of people to delay gratification?

Answer 204

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

Question 205

Describe the classic study by Mischel and Ebbesen called the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

Answer 205

• 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

Question 206

Describe the follow-up studies’ findings on Mischel and Ebbesen’s Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

Answer 206

• 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

Question 207

Describe the 2018 study by Watts and colleagues examining adolescents who had participated in a version of the marshmallow test as children

Answer 207

• 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

Question 208

Intelligence is correlated with what characteristic of the prefrontal cortex?

Answer 208

It’s correlated with volume of the prefrontal cortex

Question 209

TRUE OR FALSE: humans are always rational in their decision-making behavior

Answer 209

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

Question 210

Who takes advantage of the fact that human’s decision-making isn’t always rational and often depends on irrelevant factors?

Answer 210

• 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

Question 211

What’s the nudge theory?

Answer 211

• 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

Question 212

What are some examples of the application of the nudge theory?

Answer 212

• 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

Question 213

Describe Pichert and Katsikopoulos (2008) finding on the use of default or opt-out choice framing (nudge theory)

Answer 213

• 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

Question 214

What are some criticisms of the nudge theory?

Answer 214

• 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

Question 215

Describe Tannenbaum et al. (2017) study on the nudge theory and the partisan nudge bias

Answer 215

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”

Question 216

What’s the link between loss aversion and the amygdala?

Answer 216

• 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

Question 217

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?

Answer 217

Inductive reasoning

Question 218

When are we not aware that we’re using inductive reasoning?

Answer 218

When engaging in heuristics

Question 219

What could overusing inductive reasoning lead to?

Answer 219

Biases

Question 220

What’s the difference between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning?

Answer 220

Inductive: specific observations -> generalizations -> theories (reasoning from information)

Deductive: theories -> predictions -> experiments (reasoning towards information)

Question 221

What are the 3 basic types of syllogisms?

Answer 221

• 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)

Question 222

What’s the omission bias?

Answer 222

• 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

Question 223

People with what kind of damage don’t engage with the moral dilemma of the trolley problem as much?

Answer 223

Frontal lobe damage

Question 224

How to test if the conditional statement “If it is raining, I will get wet” is valid?

Answer 224

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?

Question 225

What’s the falsification principle of conditional reasoning?

Answer 225

• 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

Question 226

What are the 3 categories for how heuristics lead to bias?

Answer 226

• 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

Question 227

What are biases?

Answer 227

• Systematically inaccurate choices that don’t reflect a
  current situation
• Deviations from rationality (errors) that are caused by using heuristics

Question 228

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

Answer 228

• 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

Question 229

Explain how the availability heuristic can play into how we view our personal challenges vs other people’s challenges

Answer 229

• 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

Question 230

What are illusory correlations?

Answer 230

• 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

Question 231

What’s the Gambler’s fallacy?

Answer 231

• 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’

Question 232

What are examples of Gambler’s fallacy in the real world?

Answer 232

• 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

Question 233

What’s the hot-hand belief?

Answer 233

• 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

Question 234

In what kind of people was optimism bias not found in Sharot et al.’s study on predicting life events?

Answer 234

• This optimism bias wasn’t present in depression
• Presentation differs with degree of depression

Question 235

What’s the difference between post-mortem and pre-mortem techniques?

Answer 235

• 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

Question 236

Errors in what processes provide insight into underlying mechanisms of reasoning?

Answer 236

Heuristics and biases

Question 237

What kind of psychology tests could present the anchoring heuristic?

Answer 237

• 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

Question 238

What’s regression toward the mean?

Answer 238

• 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

Question 239

What’s the bounded rationality theory of heuristics?

Answer 239

• 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

Question 240

What’s the ecological rationality theory of heuristics?

Answer 240

• 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

Question 241

What’s an example of the ecological rationality theory of heuristics?

Answer 241

• 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

Question 242

What are some examples of types of heuristics?

Answer 242

• Availability
• Representativeness
• Anchoring and adjustment
• Regression towards the Mean

Question 243

What’s Perceptual Decision Making?

Answer 243

• 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?

Question 244

What are the 2 types of decision-making?

Answer 244

• Perceptual Decision Making
• Value-based Decision making

Question 245

What’s Value-based Decision making?

Answer 245

• 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

Question 246

What’s risk?

Answer 246

• Taking an action despite the outcome being uncertain
• Specific to Value-based decision making

Question 247

What’s ambiguity?

Answer 247

When you have incomplete information about the consequences

Question 248

How could risks be framed?

Answer 248

As Gains or Losses

Question 249

Describe risky decision-making

Answer 249

• 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

Question 250

What are the different risk attitude profiles?

Answer 250

¤ 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

Question 251

Describe risk preferences

Answer 251

• 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

Question 252

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.

Answer 252

Framing effect -> for gains

Question 253

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.

Answer 253

Framing effect -> loss

Question 254

Describe the framing effect of gains vs loss

Answer 254

¤ 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!

Question 255

Give a real-life example of the framing effect of gains vs loss

Answer 255

¤ 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

Question 256

What’s the prospect theory?

Answer 256

¤ 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

Question 257

Describe the Fourfold Pattern of Prospect Theory

Answer 257

• 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)