Lecture 9 Judgements, Decisions And Heuristics Flashcards
What is satisficing?
Herbert Simon
Basically, it’s picking the first satisfactory alternative.
What does Herbert Simon mean with the term bounded rationality?
We can only be as rational as our limited search and computational capacities allow us
There are constraints that prevent us from making fully rational decisions
What is a heuristic?
A simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions
What were Paul meehl’s 2 major findings?
Clinical prediction performs very poorly relative to statistical predictions
Clinical prediction out weights case characteristics and underweighted base rates.
What were Evans and stanovich’s 2 systems
System 1: intuitive, fast, nonconscious and automatic
System 2: reflective, slow, conscious and controlled.
System 1 feeds intuitions and understandings to system 2
How to improve system 2’s intervention?
Increase meta cognitive difficulty
Provide rewards to motivate participants to check their intuitive impressions.
Ensure that participants are not simultaneously having to perform other kinds of mental effort.
What is the proposed mechanism of system 1?
Instead of seeking the answer to some complex question, seek the answer to an easier question you believe to be related
What is the representativeness heuristic?
When probability judgements are substituted with assessments of resemblance
Biases: conjunction fallacy
Misperceptions of randomness
Apophenia
What is the conjunction fallacy?
People get this wrong because they use the representative heuristic - it is when people assume that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one
Tversky and kahnemann - Linda the bank teller and feminist.
People get this wrong because the “bank teller and feminist option” is more REPRESENTATIVE, but mathematically, it’s less probable.
What is the insensitivity to size heuristic?
A bias that’s occurs when people judge the probability of obtaining a sample statistic without respect to the sample size.
Variation is more likely in smaller samples!
Tversky and kahnemann - hospital problem.
Representative heuristic used
What is the misperceptions if randomness?
Randomness has more repetitions than we think.
We tend to impose casual narratives on random data
Gamblers fallacy.
Representative heuristic used
What is Apophenia?
The human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random data
Representative heuristic used
What did tversky and kahnemann find in the lawyer/engineer study?
Participants rate the probability of being an engineer or lawyer
Ignored base rates
What is the availability heuristic?
Factors which come to mind easily are assigned greater weight in the formulation of judgements. We judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which instances of it come to mind
Bias: effectiveness of a search set
Outcome bias
What is the bias of the effectiveness of a search set?
“Are words beginning with the letter k more common, or words with k in the third position?”
Answer is words with k in the third position
Participants were in favour of the first position even though k is more common in third position - because easier to think of words starting with k
And when asked if “ing” or n is more in a text… People say ING. Wrong. - tversky and kahnemann
Ross and sicoly - spouses estimated their contribution to shared activities, most overestimated
Schawrz et al - participants asked to list 6 or 12 examples of themselves being either assertive or unassertive.
Results showed that if they were asked to list 12 of assertive, they’d view themselves as less assertive: Assessment of assertiveness affected by ease of recall!!
What is outcome bias?
Error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of the decision is already known….
So when the behaviour produces more ethical condemnation when it happens to produce a bad rather than good outcome, even if it is by chance.
Eg. Doctor viewed as bad if patient dies, even if risk was told beforehand
What is the anchoring heuristic
When estimating in quantities, people start with an intuitive reference point (anchor) and make adjustments to it
Can have self generated or experimenter generated anchors
Eg: people spun a wheel before answering how many African countries in the UN - got affected by the number
Eg: Englich et al. Ahead of a mock sentencing, judges were informed of an irrelevant anchor by a journalist. They re affected by it.
Criticisms of kahnemanns work
- biases lack external validity
- heuristics are vaguely theorised and there has been a lack of formal modelling
- overstates problems caused by the computational limitations of brains
