Lecture 2 - How We Make Judgments Flashcards
What is the traditional view?
Kahneman & Tversky
We use heuristics- A short cut ‘rule of thumb’ for making judgments
Heuristics often produce the ‘right’ answer but sometimes they lead to biases:
a systematic ‘error’ in judgment relative to some normative standard, e.g., probability theory
Representativeness - Conjunction fallacy
The likely hood of things being placed into specific categories.
Use features to place them in categories
Representativeness - misconceptions of chance
more spread out the numbers on the lottery ticket are thought to be more likely to win
Representativeness heuristic
Judge whether someone or something belongs to a category by thinking about how similar they are to a stereotypical member of that category
Short cut is to make similarity judgements rather than mathematical
Availability Heuristic
more available it is we think the more likely it is to happen - the more we know or hear about it
faster to find an example
o The likelihood of events is judged based on the ease with which instances come to mind
Anchoring
Base judgement and view point off of the anchoring value or item.
typically people don’t adjust enough around the anchor
BASE RATE NEGLECT - ignoring base info
Recognition Heuristic – Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002
study - given the names of 2 cities (Americans recognise both, germans recognise 1)
More likely to choose what you recognise
Fast and efficient
Rationality and judgement
Heuristics can lead to irrational judgements that can be overwritten with thought
We are rational in the sense that we have evolved decision heuristics that are adaptive and effective in response to environmental demands
Judgments of likelihood - Gambling
Make predictions from patterns, and make patterns in things that have no pattern to make it easier
Gamblers fallacy - after a streak of events the opposite will happen next
