judgement bias 1

Question 1

what are cognitive heuristics

Answer 1

mental strategies used under ‘uncertain conditions’ to make them easier to understand

Question 2

why use cognitive heuristics

5 reasons

Answer 2

Used due to cognitive limitations 
Working memory and attention
Used due to external constraints
e.g., limited time
Used due to motivational constraints
Lack of interest in or understanding of task

Question 3

impact of heuristics on biases

Answer 3

Using cognitive heuristics involves not taking (sufficient) account of relevant information, which leads to biased judgements or decisions
Relying too much on information that’s easy to retrieve from memory can create a bias

Question 4

what was Kahneman and Tversky’s original approach to cognitive heuristics

Answer 4

challenged the dominance of normative models of thinking

used cog heuristics as a way to make complex tasks more manageable

Question 5

what were the 3 cognitive heuristics ID’d by Kahneman and Tversky

Answer 5

availability
representativeness
anchoring and adjustment

Question 6

define “availability”

Answer 6

judging something based on ease of recall/mental simulation of consistent evidence or info

Question 7

define “representativeness”

Answer 7

making judgements based on the similarity between seemingly related things ( e.g personality characteristics and star signs)

Question 8

define anchoring and adjustment

Answer 8

making judgements based on numerical info - bias is due to insufficiently adjusting from the anchor

Question 9

Kahneman and Tversky’s research on availability using newspaper articles

Answer 9

found that the p’s who read newspaper articles about house fires overestimated the chance of involvement in an accident reading the article served as a memory primer for event consistent info (led to overestimation

Question 10

Kahneman and Tversky - English words starting with R and R as 3rd letter

Answer 10

most p’s wrongly judged more english words start w/ R than have R as 3rd letter
actually 3x as many words with r as 3rd letter but easier to think of words beginning with R
( greater cog availability of these words as tend to remember words based on 1st letter

Question 11

Taxi cab study on Representativeness

gave p’s scenario about hit& run incident involving blue or green company taxi

Answer 11

p’s told of correctness of eyewitness ID of colour of taxi involved (80%)

Question 12

results of taxi cab study

Answer 12

overestimated probability blue or green taxi involved in accident

Question 13

implications of taxi cab study

Answer 13

judging on basis of info in scenario about taxi’s colour rather than proportion of blue & green taxis in city

Question 14

what is conjunction fallacy

Answer 14

thinking error (non-logical) occurring with probabilities 
2 (+) not perfectly correlated things judged as being more likely to occur together than seperately

Question 15

why does conjunction fallacy violate the extension rule of probability theory

Answer 15

because mathematically the prob of 2 (+) events occurring together has to be higher than likelihood they’ll occur separately

Question 16

the linda problem study (representativeness and conjunction fallacy)

Answer 16

p’s given info about characteristics, job and interests of linda most p’s judged 2 pieces of info together as more likely to occur than each piece seperately