Lecture 9: Decision Making Flashcards
What is decision making?
- making a judgment among a set of options
What is reasoning?
- coming to a conclusion based on given premises which we assume to be true
- involves coming to a conclusion based on given premises or observations which we assume to be true
→ rationalism/a priori/deduction
→ empiricism/a posteriori/induction
What are categorical syllogisms?
- involve drawing a conclusion from two statements that we assume are true
- when we cannot draw a logical conclusion from a syllogism it is indeterminate
- solved using mental/situational models
What are Euler circles?
- represent alternative to mental models
What limits mental models used to solve syllogisms?
- working memory
- prior knowledge
- visual imagery
What is conditional reasoning?
- logical determination of whether the evidence supports, refutes, or is irrelevant to the stated if-then relationship
- set of propositions given using an “if… then…” structure
→ asked to draw a logical conclusion from the propositions - antecedent (“if…”) and consequent (“then…”)
What are the two valid actions in a conditional reasoning task?
- affirm the antecedent (modus ponens)
- deny the consequent (modus tollens)
What is the Wason Selection Task?
- each card has letter on one side, number on other
→ if card has a vowel on one side, then even number on other
→ must flip over a vowel (affirm antecedent) and odd number (deny consequent)
What is a confirmation bias?
- tendency to look for information that supports a claim and avoid information that refutes it
What did the Wason Selection Task show about the difficulty of reasoning tasks?
- more difficult if they involve abstract concepts
- we can use pragmatic reasoning schemas to help reduce the resources required to solve the task
What is the belief-bias effect?
- tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion
What is inductive reasoning?
- based on observations of the world
→ make inferences about what is likely true - impossible to find a logically certain conclusion
→ limited by probability guesses
What is expected utility theory?
- assumes people are rational and want to make optimal choice
- based on subjective utility or subjective probability
What is subjective utility?
- prefer one thing over another by seeing the utility of its outcomes
- in decision making, “I’ll go hang out with them because they can help me with class later”.
What is subjective probability?
- guess of an outcome of a process
- in decision making, “I’ll stay home because I can study better by myself”.
What is the availability heuristic?
- classic heuristic
- judge frequency based on ease of retrieval from memory
→ affected by recency, familiarity, saliency - i.e. words with “e” or “k” as last letter
What is the simulation heuristic?
- classic heuristic
- estimation of likelihood of a particular scenario rather than a list of examples
→ likelihood you will turn out to be a motivational speaker v. clinical psychologist - related to counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias
What is counterfactual thinking?
- dwelling on outcomes that didn’t happen
- what if’s tend to concern action rather than inaction
→ if Bill placed a bet on a horse winning and lost $40 and Ken failed to place a bet on a horse and missed out on $40, Ben is judged to feel worse about his decision
What is the representativeness heuristic?
- classic heuristic
- judge likelihood based on how similar it is to the population from which it was drawn or process that produced it
→ that is, we judge A’s belongingness to B based on how much it resembles B
→ also judgments of randomness - i.e. births in small hospital v. large hospital, jobs of people, etc.
What was Kahneman & Tversky’s study on birth order?
- People would guess birth order in cities, like B G B G B or B G B B B
→ all equally likely but latter judged as less likely
What is the base-rate fallacy?
- reliance exclusively on category representativeness and ignore information about the actual rates in which events occur
What is the conjunction fallacy?
- assuming two things are more likely together than apart based on category representativeness
Why do people still rely on heuristics?
- tractable → people can mentally keep track of everything they need to use
- robust → provide reasonable answers under a wide range of circumstances
What is the satisficing heuristic?
- select the first option that satisfied a criterion
What is the recognition heuristic?
- select the option we recognize
What is the “take the best” heuristic?
- combines recognition and satisficing
→ seeing two options, select the one that first satisfies the criterion
What is the knowledge and cognitive limitations involved with reasoning?
KNOWLEDGE
→ strategy knowledge (from error)
→ belief-bias
→ pragmatic reasoning schemas
COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS
→ confirmation bias (search errors)
→ mental model updating
What is the knowledge and cognitive limitations involved with decision making?
KNOWLEDGE
→ simulation heuristic
→ counterfactual reasoning
→ hindsight bias
COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS
→ conjunction fallacy
→ fast and frugal heuristics
What is an algorithm?
- specific solution procedure, often detailed and complex, that is guaranteed to furnish the correct answer if it is followed correctly
→ i.e. a formula
What was Kahneman & Tversky’s study on representativeness using hospitals?
- large and small hospital have 50% birth rates for each sex, which had more days where 60%+ were more?
→ most people said the same
→ but the smaller hospital would be more likely - shows insensitivity to sample size bias
What is Bayes’s theorem?
- estimates should be based on two kinds of information
→ base rate
→ likelihood ratio, i.e. assessment of usefulness of the new information
What is the anchoring and adjusting heuristic?
- influences the way people intuitively assess probabilities
- people start with an implicitly suggested reference point (the “anchor”) and make adjustments to it to reach their estimate
What is the simulation heuristic?
- mental construction or imagining of outcomes
→ forecasting of how some event will turn out or how it might have turned out under another set of circumstances
What is a downhill change?
- we alter an unusual story element, substituting a more typical or normal element in its place
→ part of counterfactual thinking
→ alter/undo unusual story elements for more normal stuff - allusion to skiing, where it’s easiest to go downhill
What is hindsight bias?
- the after-the-fact judgment that some event was very predictable, even though it wasn’t
What is the distance effect/discrimination effect?
- greater difference between two stimuli = faster decision that they differ
What is the semantic congruity effect?
- decision is faster when the dimension being judged matches or is congruent with the implied semantic dimension
- i.e. asking which balloon is “higher” because instinctively we think of balloons as floating objects so high = height; or asking which yo-yo is “lower”
What is the SNARC effect (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes effect)?
- judgments about smaller numbers are made more quickly with the left hand and judgments about larger numbers are made more quickly with the right hand
What is the prototypicality heuristic?
- strategy in which we generate examples to reason out an answer rather than follow the correct, logical procedures of deductive reasoning
