Lecture 12 - Judgements, Decision and Reasoning

Question 1

what is a heuristic?

Answer 1

simple procedure used to find adequate but often imperfect answers to difficult questions

Question 2

who is KT?

Answer 2

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky

Question 3

what is bounded rationality?

Answer 3

theory that humans reason and choose rationally, but only within the constraints imposed by their limited search and computational capacities

Question 4

what is satisficing?

Answer 4

using experience to construct an expectation of how good a solution we might reasonable achieve and halting search as soon as a solution is reached that meets the expectation

Question 5

what did paul meehl find

Answer 5

that clinical prediction performs very poorly relative to statistical prediction and that it overweights case characteristics and underweights base rates

Question 6

what are the characteristics of system 1?

Answer 6

intuitive, fast, nonconscious, automatic

Question 7

what are the characteristics of system 2?

Answer 7

reflective, slow, conscious, controlled

Question 8

how do system 1 and 2 interact?

Answer 8

• system 2 kicks in when system 1 is unable to solve/interpret/understand stimuli
• system 1 feeds system 2 and 2 normally takes this on apart from when there is something obscure not taken on by 1
• NB, 2 is not actually that slow as it is responsible for control, eg control of not saying something we shouldn’t

Question 9

how can we improve system’s 2 intervention?

Answer 9

• provide rewards to motivate checking of intuitive impressions
• reduce cog load
• increase metacog difficulty (although this one is sceptical)

Question 10

what is the proposed mechanism of system 1?

Answer 10

question substitution:
as seeking answer to complex question is hard, system 1 overwrites the question to make it an easier question it thinks is related, substituting an easy to compute feature for a hard to compute feature

Question 11

what are the 3 general purpose heuristics?

Answer 11

• representativeness
• availability
• affect

Question 12

what is the representativeness Heuristic?

give example

Answer 12

probability judgements are substituted with assessments of resemblance… the likelihood that X is Y is substituted with the “degree to which X looks like Y”
Eg, how likely is it that tom is a computer science student is substituted with how much does time resemble a comp science student?

Question 13

what is the core of the conjunction fallacy?

Answer 13

that people substitute a question about probability with similarity

Question 14

what are the biases related to representativeness heuristic?

Answer 14

• conjunction fallacy (bank teller/fem example)
• insensitivity to sample size (kids in hospital)
• misperceptions of randomness (ipod shuffle example)
• belief in the law of small numbers (mistaken confidence in adequacy of small samples representative of pop)
• hot hand fallacy
• base rate neglect (engineer v lawyer guessing)

Question 15

what is the availability heuristic?

Answer 15

factors which come to mind easily are assigned more weight in the formulation of judgments. we judge the likelihood/frequency of an event by the ease with which instances come to mind

Question 16

example of availability heuristic?

Answer 16

hollywood v train drives divorce rates? we think hollywood have higher divorce rates as we are exposed to that information more often

Question 17

what are the biases related to availability heuristic?

Answer 17

• effectiveness of search set (eg, scrabble, “ing” v “n” words)
• egocentric bias (husband v wife rating their contribution to various activities in relationship - not self serving)
• outcome (decision with positive outcome is rated as superior)

Question 18

what does schwarz suggest determines our availability? which study proposed this?

Answer 18

our subjective experience of the ease of recall
asking participants to either come up with 6 or 12 examples of assertiveness… those who had to get 12 struggled and stopped at 6, thus thinking they were not assertive, whereas those who were asked to come up with 6 assertive examples then viewed themselves as quite assertive

Question 19

what is the affect heuristic?

give eg

Answer 19

judgements are made in accordance with the intensity of the emotion felt
eg, how large are the benefits of nuclear power? and you substitute in a response as to how you feel about nuclear power

Question 20

what are the biases related to affect heuristic?

Answer 20

• negative risk/benefit correlation (benefit/risk of nuclear power leads to inferring the other (risk/benefit) of it)
• insensitivity to numbers (saving % of 150 lives was more supported than saving 150 lives)

Question 21

what is a so called heuristic?

Answer 21

anchoring heuristic

Question 22

what is the anchoring “heuristic”?

Answer 22

when estimating quantities, people start with an intuitive reference point (anchor) and make adjustments to it

Question 23

what is an example of the anchoring heuristic

Answer 23

1x2x3 etc gets smaller estimate than 3x2x1 etc

Question 24

what were the 3 critiques of KT’s work

Answer 24

1. KT’s biases lack external validity
2. have been vaguely theorised/specified and there has been a lack of formal modelling
3. overstates the problems caused by computational limits of our brains

Question 25

what are some examples of the critique: 1. KT’s biases lack external validity

Answer 25

minor changes in wording/context could sometimes debias people, eg

1. eliciting frequencies rather than probabilities
2. emphasising the role of random sampling

Question 26

what is an example of the critique: KT’s work overstates the problems caused by computational limits of our brains

Answer 26

complex methods won’t necessarily outperform simple one

the fast and frugal methods can be better

Question 27

what is an example of a fast and frugal method?

Answer 27

recognition heuristic

Question 28

what is the recognition heuristic

give eg

Answer 28

theory that you may actually be correct if you recognise one object and not the other which leads you to determine it has the higher value

eg: which city has more inhabitants question
- those who recognises only one were more often correct

Question 29

what heuristic might come into play if “both cities” are recognised?

Answer 29

“Take the best”

Question 30

what is the “Take the best” heuristic?

Answer 30

look up cues in order of their validity, stop search when ev for one object (city featured in film) but not the other is found