Lecture 12. judgements decisions and reasonings Flashcards
What are the three agreed upon heuristics?
Representative
Availability
Affect
Why was anchoring not considered a heuristic?
there was no question substitution in regards to this heuristic
What is the heuristics and biases program? What does heuristics mean? what does biases mean?
The heuristics and biases programs central idea is that judgement and decision making often rests on simplifying heuristics instead of extensive algorithmic processing.
a heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect answers to difficult questions
A bias is a systematic error of judgement
Kahneman and Tversky saw very strong importance in heuristics. Steven pinker thought what?
That heuristics are one of the most important contributions to human life from psychology
What did herbie simon do?
Hint: he was a forebear in heuristics
He came up with bounded rationality and satisficing
Satisficing - using experience to construct an expectation of how good a solution we might achieve and halting search as soon as a solution is reached that meets that expectation
Who the hell is Paul Mehl?
Statistics guy that showed that clinical prediction performs really poorly
What did kahneman and tversky do with kahneman’s earlier work on perception?
Used the work on perception to work with judgement and decision making
What is system 1 and system 2 in terms of judgement and perception? if they are characters what type of character would System 1 be? What type of character would system 2 be?
System 1 would be rash and fast and intuitive and automatic in decision making
“a system 1 kinda guy”
System 2 would be a more calculated and reflective kind of person, slower to make a decision, needed to weigh up all the options etc. Reflective, Slow, Conscious, Controlled.
What is the name of Kahnemans book?
Thinking fast (1) and thinking slow (2)
Would are additional characteristics system 2 work to?
Control, not saying stupid stuff, calculating arithmetic problems
What type of test intentionally allows system 1 to create an immediate, and generally wrong, answer and system 2 to “lazily rubber stamp it”
the CRT, the cognitive reflection test
What are the 3 general purpose heuristics?
Representativeness - an assessment of the degree of correspondence between a particular outcome vs a model. How much something represents or resembles something rather than the actual probability
Availability - factors that come to mind easily are assigned greater weight in the formulation of judgments. we judge likelihood/frequency of an event by the ease in which instances come to mind,
Affect - judgments are made in accordance with the intensity of the emotion felt
So whats interesting about these 3 heuristics? Are we asking questions? Are we asking substituting question statements???
All “real” heuristics, representativeness, availability and affect have question substitutions that are made about them.
What is the question substitution for representativeness?
When we are asked: “How likely is it that Tom is a computer science student”
We substitute: “How much does Tom resemble a computer science student”
What is the system 1 substitution?
We substitute an easier and more quickly calculated question in place of a hard to compute element.
How do we increase system 2 intervention?
Create greater cost/reward for p’pants to check intuitions
make sure p’pants do not have to perform multiple cognitive tasks
What is the question substitution for the availability heuristic?
We are asked: “What percentage of Hollywood celebrities are divorced?”
We substitute: “How readily do examples of Hollywood divorces come to mind?”
What is the question substitution for the affect heuristic?
We are asked: “How large are the benefits of nuclear power?
We substitute: “How do you feel about nuclear power?”
Even though its not a real heuristic, what is the affect of the anchoring heuristic?
People start with an intuitive reference point (i.e. the anchor) and then go from there
What are criticisms of K-T’s work?
i.e. what do the biases lack?
heuristics have been vaguely specified and lack what?
K-T overstate the problems caused by the what of the brain?
Biases lack external validity
heuristics have been vaguely specified and lack formal modelling
KT overstate the problems caused by the computational limitation of the brain
In terms of external validity, what are the issues with heuristics?
the effect of heuristics can be reduced by differently phrasing questions, making the issue not as transferable
the criticism suggests that heuristics might be artefacts of experimental design, results might not generalise
Who was a major opponent of KT?
Hint: He was a German banjo player
Gigerenzer
Given Gigernezer’s criticism of KT’s work was that they were fairly vague and lacked formal modelling, what was the more specific criticism here?
Vagueness - could be spread thinly to explain a lot of things post hoc
Lack of formal modelling - very little quantitative results available through heuristics
Heurtistics can criticize computational processes of the brain that simplify issues. What are two instances that this actually works well?
Fast and frugal methods can be better
“Recognition” heuristic (from gigerenzer) can be really effective. Inferring that the more recognised object has higher value can often yield valid results
What heuristic did KT miss?
The affect heuristic!
Whats the deal with the Linda question?
What heuristic does it relate to?
The question asks: Which of the following is more probable?
What do we ask instead?
This relates to the Representative heuristic.
It is asked: Which of the following is more probable?
We ask, “What does linda resemble more?”
Insensitivity to sample size size is a _____ heuristic?
representativeness heuristic. Probability judgements are substituted with assessments of resemblance. System 1 will respond with how much something represents the questions
What heuristic does the Linda question correspond to?
The representativeness heuristic, because we look at what we think Linda represents, rather than the probability that she is something.
This is also known as the conjunction fallacy.
What does the conjunction fallacy mean?
The conjunction fallacy (also known as the Linda problem) is a formal fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.
Conjunction definition: the action or an instance of two or more events or things occurring at the same point in time or space. joining together probability and representativeness
With representativeness/conjunction fallacy? What is the issue here? What are we evaluating as the same thing when we shouldnt be?
We consider mean rank of likelihood and mean rank of similarity as being the same thing when they are very different
The tennis thingy, when we rank something seems true, Borg coming out on top, as more likely, but it is less probable than something else, what is going on here?
Conjunction fallacy! Representativeness heuristic
What is underlying crux of Insentivity to sample size?
Larger samples are more likely to represent the population, therefore the smaller sample size is more likely to return weird figures
What test removed the perspective of probability and tested representativeness heuristic with dice
The dice experiment in which the more probable option occurring more often in a sequence, even when there is a lower number sequence that is contained in the other options
What is the misperception of randomness bias?
We think “random” results should be more evenly distributed when in reality sequences can include the same result clumped together.
Randomness contains more repetitions than we think.
What was the first ever paper that KT produced?
Belief in the law of ____ numbers.
The law of small numbers
too much faith in sample sizes
What is the “hot hand”?
we think that by scoring, or winning a few times in a row, we’re more likely to win again.
What has the engineer lawyer question got to do with?
Base rate neglect - the fact the we ignore the base rate/proportion when we hear useless information.
we ask ourself how much does this person sound like and engineer, as opposed what is the probability that this person is an engineer
