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
