Lecture 9: Decision Making

Question 1

What is decision making?

Answer 1

• making a judgment among a set of options

Question 2

What is reasoning?

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

What are categorical syllogisms?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

What are Euler circles?

Answer 4

• represent alternative to mental models

Question 5

What limits mental models used to solve syllogisms?

Answer 5

• working memory
• prior knowledge
• visual imagery

Question 6

What is conditional reasoning?

Answer 6

• 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…”)

Question 7

What are the two valid actions in a conditional reasoning task?

Answer 7

• affirm the antecedent (modus ponens)

- deny the consequent (modus tollens)

Question 8

What is the Wason Selection Task?

Answer 8

• 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)

Question 9

What is a confirmation bias?

Answer 9

• tendency to look for information that supports a claim and avoid information that refutes it

Question 10

What did the Wason Selection Task show about the difficulty of reasoning tasks?

Answer 10

• more difficult if they involve abstract concepts

- we can use pragmatic reasoning schemas to help reduce the resources required to solve the task

Question 11

What is the belief-bias effect?

Answer 11

• tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion

Question 12

What is inductive reasoning?

Answer 12

• based on observations of the world
  → make inferences about what is likely true
• impossible to find a logically certain conclusion
  → limited by probability guesses

Question 13

What is expected utility theory?

Answer 13

• assumes people are rational and want to make optimal choice
• based on subjective utility or subjective probability

Question 14

What is subjective utility?

Answer 14

• 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”.

Question 15

What is subjective probability?

Answer 15

• guess of an outcome of a process

- in decision making, “I’ll stay home because I can study better by myself”.

Question 16

What is the availability heuristic?

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

What is the simulation heuristic?

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

What is counterfactual thinking?

Answer 18

• 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

Question 19

What is the representativeness heuristic?

Answer 19

• 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.

Question 20

What was Kahneman & Tversky’s study on birth order?

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

What is the base-rate fallacy?

Answer 21

• reliance exclusively on category representativeness and ignore information about the actual rates in which events occur

Question 22

What is the conjunction fallacy?

Answer 22

• assuming two things are more likely together than apart based on category representativeness

Question 23

Why do people still rely on heuristics?

Answer 23

• tractable → people can mentally keep track of everything they need to use
• robust → provide reasonable answers under a wide range of circumstances

Question 24

What is the satisficing heuristic?

Answer 24

• select the first option that satisfied a criterion

Question 25

What is the recognition heuristic?

Answer 25

• select the option we recognize

Question 26

What is the “take the best” heuristic?

Answer 26

• combines recognition and satisficing

→ seeing two options, select the one that first satisfies the criterion

Question 27

What is the knowledge and cognitive limitations involved with reasoning?

Answer 27

KNOWLEDGE
→ strategy knowledge (from error)
→ belief-bias
→ pragmatic reasoning schemas

COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS
→ confirmation bias (search errors)
→ mental model updating

Question 28

What is the knowledge and cognitive limitations involved with decision making?

Answer 28

KNOWLEDGE
→ simulation heuristic
→ counterfactual reasoning
→ hindsight bias

COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS
→ conjunction fallacy
→ fast and frugal heuristics

Question 29

What is an algorithm?

Answer 29

• specific solution procedure, often detailed and complex, that is guaranteed to furnish the correct answer if it is followed correctly
  → i.e. a formula

Question 30

What was Kahneman & Tversky’s study on representativeness using hospitals?

Answer 30

• 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

Question 31

What is Bayes’s theorem?

Answer 31

• estimates should be based on two kinds of information
  → base rate
  → likelihood ratio, i.e. assessment of usefulness of the new information

Question 32

What is the anchoring and adjusting heuristic?

Answer 32

• 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

Question 33

What is the simulation heuristic?

Answer 33

• 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

Question 34

What is a downhill change?

Answer 34

• 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

Question 35

What is hindsight bias?

Answer 35

• the after-the-fact judgment that some event was very predictable, even though it wasn’t

Question 36

What is the distance effect/discrimination effect?

Answer 36

• greater difference between two stimuli = faster decision that they differ

Question 37

What is the semantic congruity effect?

Answer 37

• 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”

Question 38

What is the SNARC effect (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes effect)?

Answer 38

• 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

Question 39

What is the prototypicality heuristic?

Answer 39

• strategy in which we generate examples to reason out an answer rather than follow the correct, logical procedures of deductive reasoning