Lecture 8 - Performance Flashcards
What are 3 reasons why we use heuristics?
Information in our environment is often limited and ambiguous
Times for decisions is often limited
Cognitive resources are often limited
What is the alternative decision making mechanisms to heuristics?
cost benefit analysis
Why can we not use a cost-benefit analysis for every decision?
We will never know 100% of the relevant information to a decision, so we can never be 100% certain of our decision.
Cost benefit analyses take up too much time and cognitive resources.
What are heuristics?
Mental shortcuts to help us make decisions, based on background knowledge, instinct and intuition. This then reduces cognitive load and the time we need to make decisions
What makes a good heuristic?
It uses as little of our cognitive resources as possible (requires little effort), most of the time it works/is correct, it is applicable in many circumstances (though is not accurate reliable in every situation),
What are biases?
Systematic errors based on heuristics. They are not like other errors as they systematic and consistent, demonstrating a problem in our reasoning when making decisions.
How can biases/heuristics affect us all?
Inconsistencies in decisions show that we are using heuristics. As these are a feature of normal cognitive processing, they affect us all.
What are anchoring and adjustment heuristics?
A biased type of heuristic that involves different starting points leading to different estimates that are biased towards the starting values. Anchors (starting points) are often irrelevant to the estimate, but if we throw them in when trying to make an estimate, the numerical judgement/estimate will be affected by this.
What are availability heuristics?
A biased type of heuristic that assesses the probability of an event based on how easily this event/target comes to mind. However, this is just what cognitive representations are most accessible, not how frequent something actually is. This heuristic is therefore often used to reduce cognitive effort.
How can recency effect affect availability heuristics?
If we have experienced something recently, we assume it occurs more/is assigned more to us than others. (i.e. we assume we do most of the washing up at home because we did it most recently)
What is framing?
How we make judgements/decisions based on the wording or phrasing of those pitching the choice/factor to be judged (i.e. in marketing). For instance, options presented to us can either be presented as gains or losses. If they are presented as gains, we are more likely to make positive judgments/choose that option, than if an option is presented with semantic relations that we associate with loss.
What is prospect theory?
A way to explain framing. It suggests that a loss is perceived as more significant, and therefore more worthy of avoiding, than an equivalent gain. A sure gain is also more preferred to a probable gain and a probable loss is preferred to a sure loss. Therefore, we look for options and information that suggests certain gain (even if this is bullshit).
