INDIVIDUAL: Cognitive Biases Flashcards
Is addiction logical?
Addiction is illogical, addicts engage in behaviours that have negative outcomes comes, but they do it anyways, suggesting they have problems in the way they think, perhaps cognitive biases
Irrational Thinking:
Addiction would not occur if individuals were rational thinkers, the cost of the additions outweigh any benefits. It can be therefore assumed that addiction is the product of faulty beliefs or irrational thinking processes
What are cognitive biases?
Everyone has cognitive biases not just addicts. Cognitive biases are our natural inclination to make information match what we already believe or want to believe. Cognitive biases can be caused by heuristics
What is a heuristic?
Quick and simple rules people use when making judgments and descion, they are seen as mental shortcuts, they work effectively the majority of the time, but can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability and rational choice.
What are the 2 types of heuristics?
- Representativeness Heuristic
- Availability Heuristics
How does the representativeness heuristics affect our descion-making?
-Makes us believe that random events have a pattern, it makes us feel that an unlikely event is more likely to happen than it actually is in reality, and we know this because of the probability
How can this heuristic help explain a gambling addiction?
Gamblers Fallacy
-Gambler may feel that a bet is a ‘sure thing’ due to the representativeness heuristic telling them that an outcome is due
-Gamblers may feel that after a run of loosing bets they are ‘due’ a win
How does the availability heuristic affect our belief?
Events that are more easily recalled from memory may bias our assessments of how likely an outcome is. For example the lottery, people hear about the rate of winners not the millions of people who don’t win
Therefore may cause gamblers to overestimate likelihood of winning
How can this heuristic help explain a gambling addiction?
They will easier remember when they won big, and it will be harder to remember the times when they lost
As memories of winning are more ‘available’ than the memories of loosing, gamblers will over estimate
What are other additional cognitive biases?
- Illusion of control
- Hindsight bias
- Self serving bias
- Additional bias
What is ‘illusion of contol’?
-Many gamblers will falsely believe that if they can control some aspects of the process then their chances of winning is higher/improved
-For example, they believe they might win if they choose certain seat
What is ‘Hindsight Bias’ ?
A gambler will claim that they are not shocked by the outcome of the gamble and could have predicted the outcome. This helps them maintain belief that once their skills have improved, they will be able to win more constantly
What is ‘self-serving Bias’?
-This is the tendency of gamblers to attribute only wins to internal causes, for example own skill And losses to external factors, like bad luck. This helps them feel its not their fault if they loose, and therefore continue to gamble
What is ‘attentional Bias’?
-Refers to when an addict is paying attention to certain stimuli & ignore other things to the environment. The addict pays more attention to stimuli relating to the addiction. This helps explain maintenance of an addiction
-Supporting Evidence: McCusher & Gettings - 1997
What was McCusher & Gettings research?
-45 Particpants: Gamblers, spouses of gamblers, control group
-Conducted modified stroop test using gambling-related words compared to spouses and control group
