Judgement & Decision Making Flashcards
What are the 3 things involved in judgement?
Minimising cognitive effect
Perseverance of false beliefs
Cognitive biases
What 3 areas were studies in the area of decision making?
Decision frames
Risk strategies
Optimistic bias
What is the definition of judgement?
The process by which we form opinions, reach conclusions, and make critical evaluations of people and events on the basis of available information
What is the definition of decision making?
The process of choosing between alternatives, selecting and rejecting available options
What is the main difference between judgements and decisions?
Judgements are generally spontaneous and automatic but decision making is generally controlled and deliberate
What is an inference?
The reasoning process of drawing a conclusion on the basis of a sample of evidence or on the basis of a sample of prior beliefs and theories. Our schemas are an example of a process that helps guide our judgements
What can bias or create errors in our judgements or decisions?
Past experiences an inferences
We are cognitive misers; what does this mean?
We attempt to process information with minimum mental effort, so we tend to use the minimal, most salient information from our past experiences in order to construct our judgements
What 2 effects does taking shortcuts have on our judgements?
Over-generalising
Stereotyping
Are initial impressions persistent or not to change?
persistent and resistent to change
What 2 processes are involved when you merge your initial judgement and additional information?
Assimilation or
Accommodation
What is assimilation?
Fitting new data (a person or situation) within existing theories (stereotypes about the person or situation) e.g. he’s only being nice to lull me into a false sense of security
What is accommodation?
Changing the stereotype to incorporate new information
Which is more common and easier for us to compute, assimilation or accommodation?
Assimilation
What does our steadfast belief in our formed stereotypes tend to lead to?
Overconfidence in our beliefs and an underestimate in our probability of being wrong
If you were overly confident about completing your assessment in two days time even though its probably unlikely, what would this be known as?
Optimistic Bias
e.g. smokers deem themselves less likely than others who smoke to be at risk
What are cognitive biases?
fitting new data (a person or situation) within existing theories (stereotypes about the person or situation)
Judgements and decisions are often made on the basis of _______ rather than _________ __________ information
intuition
objective statistical
What are two common errors?
perceiving random events as non-random e.g. bad luck
perceiving correlated events as causally related
What is anchoring bias?
The insufficient judgement — up or down — from an original starting value when judging the probable value of some event or outcome
What is the availability heuristic?
Judging events that are more readily imagined or retrieved from memory, as more frequent or probable
e.g. do more people die of AIDS or asthma?
What is the representative heuristic?
Belonging to a particular category implies having the characteristics considered typical of members of that category
e.g. assuming two people will have the same personality because they look the same
What is base-rate information?
the statistical probability of a given outcome or an accumulated body of knowledge
What is the opposite of a stereotype?
base-rate information
What are decision frames?
The way a problem is presented
E.g. medical risk viewed from either a survival frame or a mortality frame
When do people choose differently when assessing risk?
When they’re gaining something or when they’re losing something
