Judgment, decisions and reasoning Flashcards
Reasoning
Cognitive processes by which people start with information and come to conclusions that go beyond that information. See also Deductive reasoning; Inductive reasoning.
Judgment
Making a decision or drawing a conclusion.
Decision
Making choices between alternatives.
Inductive reasoning
Reasoning in which a conclusion follows from a consideration of evidence. This conclusion is stated as being probably true rather than definitely true, as can be the case for the conclusions from deductive reasoning.
Availability heuristic
Events that are more easily remembered are judged to be more probable than events that are less easily remembered.
Conjunction rule
The probability of the conjunction of two events (such as feminist and bank teller) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents (feminist alone or bank teller alone).
Representativeness heuristic
The probability that an event A comes from class B can be determined by how well A resembles the properties of class B.
Illusory correlations
A correlation that appears to exist between two events, when in reality there is no correlation or it is weaker than it is assumed to be.
Stereotypes
An oversimplified generalization about a group or class of people that often focuses on negative characteristics. See also Illusory correlation.
Base rate
The relative proportions of different classes in a population. Failure to consider base rates can often lead to errors of reasoning.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to selectively look for information that conforms to our hypothesis and to overlook information that argues against it.
Law of large numbers
The larger the number of individuals that are randomly drawn from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire population.
Backfire effect
Occurs when individuals’ support for a particular viewpoint becomes stronger when faced with corrective facts opposing their viewpoint.
Myside bias
Type of confirmation bias in which people generate and test hypotheses in a way that is biased toward their own opinions and attitudes.
Categorical syllogisms
A syllogism in which the premises and conclusion describe the relationship between two categories by using statements that begin with All, No, or Some.
Deductive reasoning
Reasoning that involves syllogisms in which a conclusion logically follows from premises. See also Inductive reasoning.
Syllogism
A series of three statements: two premises followed by a conclusion. The conclusion can follow from the premises based on the rules of logic. See also Categorical syllogism; Conditional syllogism.
Premises
The first two statements in a syllogism. The third statement is the conclusion.
Validity
Quality of a syllogism whose conclusion follows logically from its premises.
Conditional syllogisms
Syllogism with two premises and a conclusion, like a categorical syllogism, but whose first premise is an “If … then” statement.
Belief bias
Tendency to think a syllogism is valid if its conclusion is believable or that it is invalid if the conclusion is not believable.
Mental model approach
In deductive reasoning, determining if syllogisms are valid by creating mental models of situations based on the premises of the syllogism.
Mental model
A specific situation that is represented in a person’s mind.
Wason four-card problem
A conditional reasoning task developed by Wason that involves four cards. Various versions of this problem have been used to study the mechanisms that determine the outcomes of conditional reasoning tasks.
