Introduction Flashcards
What is Daniel Kahneman’s aim for water cooler conversation?
To improve our ability to identify and understand errors in judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. In at least some cases, an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause
Describe the differences in thinking style between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
Amos was the more logical thinker, with an orientation to the theory and an unfailing sense of direction.
Daniel was more intuitive and rooted in the psychology of perception.
Describe the practice which Amos and Daniel adopted to going about their research.
Their reaserch was a conversation, in which they invented questions and jointly examined their intuitive answers. They were not looking for the correct answer to the statistical questions they posed, but to identify and analyze the intuitive answer, the first one that came to mind, the one they were tempted to make, even when they knit it to be wrong.
Which two broad ideas did social scientists broadly accept in the 1970’s?
That people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound.
That emotions explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.
How did Daniel and Amos challenge the two assumptions about human thought prevailing in the 1970’s?
They documented systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and they traced those errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.
Are all intuitive judgments under uncertainty produced by the heuristics Daniel and Amos studied?
No, the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by hours of prolonged practice than by heuristics.
Skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices.
Briefly explain expert intuition.
The situation provides a cue, this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
When do expert develop valid intuitions?
When the experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it.
Describe how intuition works when confronted with a problem.
If the individual has relevant expertise, they will recognize the situation and the intuitive solution that comes tot heir mind is likely to be correct.
When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
Briefly describe the differences between slow and fast thinking.
Slow thinking is a more deliberate and effortful form of thinking.
Fast thinking involves both expert and heuristic intuition, as well as the entirely automatic mental activities of perception and memory.
