Intuition & Reason

Question 1

What are the properties of System 1 and System 2?

Answer 1

System 1: Intuition
- automatic and effortless
- rapid, simultaneous judgment
- concrete
- associative activation
- low self-awareness
- e.g. what number is bigger: 17 or 24?

System 2: Reasoning
- deliberate and effortful
- slow, serial judgement
- abstract
- rule-based reasoning
- high self-awareness
- e.g. 24 x 17 = ?

Question 2

What do we use System 1 for?

Answer 2

1. detect that one object is more distant than another
2. orient the source of a sudden sound
3. make a disgust face when we are shown a horrible picture
4. detect hostility in a voice
5. answer to: 2 + 2
6. read words on a large billboard
7. drive a car on an empty road
8. find a strong move in chess
9. understand simple sentences

Question 3

What is a heuristic?

Answer 3

effortless mental shortcuts that provide sufficient answers to common problems of judgement

Question 4

What is the availability heuristic?

Answer 4

judging the likelihood of an event or the correctness of an hypothesis based on how easily the hypothesis or event comes to mind
- people believe that things that are easy to bring to mind are more common and likely

Question 5

What is metacognitive fluency?

Answer 5

the tendency to base judgments of quality, safety, and familiarity, and veracity on the ease of processing
- the feeling that things are disfluent leads to the judgement that attention is needed
- disfluency is an alert signal for System 2 to monitor System 1 0 to get off “automatic pilot”

Question 6

What is the representativeness heuristic?

Answer 6

the tendency to judge the likelihood of things or objects in terms of how well they seem to represent or match a particular prototype
- If it seems X, then it must be X. However, we ignore how often X occurs
- base-rate neglect

Question 7

What is Base-rate neglect?

Answer 7

the tendency to put more weight on specific, individualing information than general, statistical information when making judgements