Heuristics Flashcards
Inductive reasoning
inferring
Ex: I’ve only seen black crows, so all crows are black
Can never be 100% sure, but very close
Deductive reasoning
using rules of logic
Availability heuristic
More easily remembered events/instances are judged as more probable than less easily remembered events/instances
Example of availability heuristic
Ex: “Which is more common, words beginning with r or words that have r as the third letter?”
Third letter is more common, but we think it’s words that begin with r because we can more easily think of them
Availability: We tend to overestimate the likelihood of dramatic/newsworthy events
Boring events like an asthma death is thought to be less likely than tornado deaths, even though the former is 20x more likely
We think crime is a lot more prevalent than it is because it makes the news
Illusory correlations
Availability heuristic contributes to illusory correlations
Erroneously concluding that A and B are correlated when they’re actually not
Representativeness heuristic
Event/instance A is judged as more likely to belong to category B if A has many properties usually associated with category B
The more typical something is to a category, we think it belongs
Example of representativeness heuristic
Ex: Robert wears glasses and is quiet, is he more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?
Way more farmers than librarians in the world
Base rates
certain outcomes are more likely than others
→ Baye’s Theorem
Small samples lead to erroneous inferences
Conjunction fallacy
Ignoring the conjunction rule– the probability of two joint events cannot exceed the probability of the events separately
Example of conjunction fallacy
Ex: Linda majored in philosophy and is a social activist, is she more likely to be a bank teller or a bank teller and a feminist?
