Heuristik och Rationalitet - Del 2 Flashcards
Milgrams lydnadsexperiment (Obedience)
Definition: Milgram’s obedience experiment demonstrated the extent to which individuals comply with authority figures’ instructions, even when those instructions conflict with their personal conscience.
Explanation: Participants believed they were administering increasingly intense electric shocks to a learner. Despite the learner’s apparent distress, a surprisingly high percentage of participants obeyed the experimenter’s commands to continue. This highlights the powerful influence of authority and situational factors on behavior. It relates to concepts of social influence and the power of situational factors over dispositional ones.
Confirmation bias
Definition: Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.
Explanation: Imagine you believe climate change is a hoax. You’re more likely to read and trust articles supporting this view, dismissing contradictory evidence as biased or flawed. This selective processing reinforces your initial belief, illustrating confirmation bias.
Availability bias
Definition: Availability bias is a cognitive shortcut where judgments about the likelihood of events are influenced by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind.
Explanation: Imagine judging the risk of shark attacks versus car accidents. Shark attacks are more sensational, readily recalled, thus seeming more likely despite statistically being far less frequent than car accidents. This illustrates how easily retrieved memories skew our perception of probability.
Law of small numbers
Definition: The law of small numbers describes our tendency to draw unwarranted conclusions from small samples, mistaking random variation for meaningful patterns.
Explanation: Imagine flipping a coin five times and getting four heads. We might wrongly conclude the coin is biased, ignoring the probability of such a fluctuation in a small sample. This illustrates how easily we overgeneralize from limited data.
Representativeness heuristic
Definition: The representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut where individuals assess the likelihood of an event based on how similar it is to a prototype or stereotype, rather than on objective probabilities.
Explanation: Imagine judging if someone is a librarian based on how bookish they appear. We might ignore the actual probability of librarians in the population, focusing instead on how well they fit our ‘librarian’ stereotype. This shortcut can be efficient but leads to errors.
The Conjunction fallacy (Linda)
Definition: The conjunction fallacy is a cognitive bias where people judge the probability of two events occurring together as more likely than the probability of one of those events occurring alone, even when the conjunction is logically impossible.
Explanation: Imagine Linda, a feminist activist. People often rate it more probable that she’s both a bank teller and a feminist activist than just a bank teller. This is incorrect; the conjunction of two events can never be more probable than one of them alone. It demonstrates how our biases affect probabilistic reasoning.
Base rate neglect
Definition: Base rate neglect is a cognitive bias where individuals tend to ignore or underemphasize the base rate (prior probability) of an event when making judgments, instead focusing on individuating information.
Explanation: Imagine a rare disease affecting only 1 in 10,000 people. A test for this disease is 99% accurate. People often neglect the low base rate and overestimate the probability of having the disease even with a positive test result, focusing on the test’s accuracy rather than the rarity of the disease.
Substitution to an easier question (Which is best? -> Which do I like?)
Definition: Substitution to an easier question is a heuristic where a complex or difficult judgment is replaced with a simpler, more readily available evaluation.
Explanation: Instead of directly assessing ‘Which option is best?’, we often substitute it with ‘Which option do I like?’, leveraging readily accessible affective information. This simplifies decision-making, but may lead to suboptimal choices if preference doesn’t align with objective quality.
Group thinking
Definition: Groupthink is a phenomenon where the desire for group harmony or conformity results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.
Explanation: Imagine a team launching a new product, ignoring dissenting voices due to pressure to agree. This prioritization of consensus over critical evaluation is groupthink, often leading to poor choices. It’s a failure of rational decision-making due to social pressures.
Sunk cost effect
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Overconfidence bias
Definition: Overconfidence bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities or the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
Explanation: Imagine someone who consistently believes they’ll ace an exam, despite underperforming in prior assessments. This exemplifies overconfidence, an inflated sense of certainty that can lead to poor decision-making. It is closely related to illusory superiority, another cognitive bias where individuals see themselves as better than average.
Expected utility theory
Definition: Expected utility theory posits that individuals make decisions by choosing the option that maximizes their expected utility, calculated as the sum of the utilities of all possible outcomes, each weighted by its probability.
Explanation: Imagine choosing between a lottery with a small chance of winning a large prize and a guaranteed smaller prize. Expected utility theory suggests you’d weigh the potential gain against its likelihood, choosing the option with the highest overall expected value, even if it’s riskier. This relates to decision-making under uncertainty, contrasting with prospect theory which considers how people perceive gains and losses differently.
Prospect theory
Definition: Prospect theory describes how individuals make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty, deviating from the normative model of expected utility theory by weighting potential gains and losses differently and exhibiting loss aversion.
Explanation: Imagine choosing between a sure $50 and a 50% chance of winning $100. Prospect theory suggests most people prefer the sure gain, even though the expected value is the same. This is because losses loom larger than equivalent gains in our minds.
Hindsight bias
Definition: Hindsight bias is the tendency to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were, inflating one’s own ability to have foreseen the outcome.
Explanation: Imagine you predicted a stock market crash. After it happens, you might exaggerate your prior certainty, saying ‘I knew it all along!’ This is hindsight bias. It distorts our memory of past events and can impact decision-making by creating a false sense of predictability.
