Lecture: cognitive Biases

Question 1

What do biases do?

Answer 1

Make individuals think irrationally

Question 2

What is a Heuristic?

Answer 2

rule of thumb, exceptions to rules look like a bias but most of the time helps you move through the world

Question 3

What is anchoring?

Answer 3

• The anchor is what you compare to when you evaluate (starting university and comparing it to high-school)
• E.g., Restaurants will put a very expensive item on the menu, to make others look reasonable. Manipulating you with anchors, when you see a 32$ meal the 18$ meal looks reasonable without that one the 18$ meal would be considered expensive

Question 4

What is the contrast/context effect?

Answer 4

The anchoring has ramifications In something called the contrast/context effect. If men look at lots of pictures of beautiful women, they will rate their wife as less attractive

Question 5

What is distinction bias?

Answer 5

Things appear more different when viewed simultaneously. If you are observing two things at the same time, you will focus more on their differences when evaluating.

Question 6

What is the bandwagon effect?

Answer 6

You believe things because everyone around you believes the same thing.
This is why cults try to keep you from talking to people not in the cult. (it doesn’t seem so crazy when you only talk to people who believe the same thing)

Question 7

What is the herd instinct?

Answer 7

• The herd instinct is believing what everyone else does to avoid social conflict (don’t wanna rock the boat)
• E.g., someone is vegan just because their boyfriend is

Question 8

What is the hostile media effect?

Answer 8

When you watch the news, you tend to think they are hostile towards your political view. When they are criticizing other people’s views you tend to think they deserve it

Question 9

What is the endowment effect/loss aversion?

Answer 9

• People will demand more to give up an object than they were willing to pay to get it. Once you own something, you find it more valuable
• Loss aversion: don’t want to lose an opportunity. Feel loss twice as acutely as we feel gain. E.g., you’d be happy if you gained 20$ but you’d feel absolutely terrible if you lost 20$

Question 10

What is temporal discounting?

Answer 10

• We value things in the future less than things now (how much something loses value into the future)
• Hyperbolic discounting (refers to the tendency for people to increasingly choose a smaller-sooner reward over a larger-later reward as the delay occurs sooner rather than later in time.)
• exponential discounting

Question 11

Where does more discounting happen?

Answer 11

more discounting in chaotic environments, because you don’t know what the future is going to hold. This is rational but we don’t know exactly what version is rational

Question 12

what is the moral credential effect?

Answer 12

• Thinking of yourself having acted morally can make you allow yourself to behave badly. You might end up making predjudice decisions because of your bias of yourself (“I am not sexist” see resumes of a male and female and think the man is better but it couldn’t be because you’‘re sexist because youre not a sexist)
• People will compensate to reach an equilibrium in many contexts
• Also called self licensing or moral licensing

Question 13

What is risk compensation

Answer 13

• If the safety measure you use, makes you feel safer than it actually is you’re in trouble (rugby players don’t use helmets but football players do and have a lot more head injuries)
• Seatbelts: Drivers are a bit safer, but deaths passed on to others (pedestrians and others die more often, because drivers drive more recklessly if they wear their seatbelt)
• Bike helmets
• People bike more dangerously wearing one
• Dietary supplements make people eat more poorly and exercise less

Question 14

What is confirmation bias?

Answer 14

• You accept, seek out and remember things that support your view
• You also interpret things in a way that support your views.
• sticking to your views in the face of contrary evidence.
• Watch for it in other people but always be aware for it in yourself, don’t just consume things you already agree with. Look for evidence against your view

Question 15

What is negativity bias?

Answer 15

• More attentive to negative information than positive
• Takes 5 good interactions to compensate for one bad
• Perhaps because its more seen in our evolutionary history

Question 16

What is outcome bias?

Answer 16

• Judge decisions on what ended up having rather than on the information available at decision making time
• Is it right to punish a person who kills someone while driving drunk more severely than another drunk driver who gets lucky and doesn’t kill anyone?

Question 17

What is omission bias?

Answer 17

-Doing something bad is more bad worse than letting something bad happen, even if in both cases the outcome is the same (see someone falling off a cliff, its worse to push them the rest of the way rather than just not do anything and watch them fall)
-Embedded in our criminal justice system
We could be helping people but were just not doing it

Question 18

What is planning fallacy?

Answer 18

• We underestimate how long it will take us to complete tasks in the future
• Makes it easy for us to overbook ourselves
• Unexpected things happen- since we don’t know what they are going to be, we don’t expect them to happen
• When someone asks you to do something in the future, think about if you would want to do it in a few days? That’s your cue for whether youd want to do it in a year
• When we imagine doing something we rarely imagine doing it wrong

Question 19

What is wishful thinking?

Answer 19

-Believe something because you want it to be true
-Innocence of someone you care about (e.g., bad information coming out about Michael Jackson, his family denies it though)
-Related to confirmation bias
We believe it because we want it to be true

Question 20

What is availability Heuristic?

Answer 20

-Assuming that things are most easily brought to memory are more common or probable
-A problem that is vivid and emotional things are easier to bring to memory
So when the news shows you only murders, you tend to think that murders are more common than they are

Question 21

What is base rate neglect?

Answer 21

Have to take into account the commonness of something in the population as a whole to determine the probability of it, ignoring this is called base rate neglect

Question 22

What is the belief bias?

Answer 22

If rain is wet then my roof is wet. My roof is wet. Therefore, rain is wet (conclusion made you believe the whole argument was valid)
Is this argument valid? Its actually not valid, if we believe in the content of the conclusion we say the whole argument is valid
Sound argument is valid and truthful, valid just means that the logic make sense

Question 23

what is a conjunction fallacy?

Answer 23

• is a formal fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.
• What is more common a person who wears Birkenstocks or a hippie who wears Birkenstocks? Most people will say hippies who wear Birkenstocks, but the probability of both of these occurring in conjunction is always less than the probability of one occurring alone. They make conjunction fallacies because they hold a prejudice or an idea about that group of people

Question 24

What is gambler’s fallacy?

Answer 24

The gamblers fallacy is thinking that after your done getting a thing over and over (red, red ,red ,red) you think you’re due for something else (black). They don’t consider that each roll is independent of the other, think they are conditional on each other

Question 25

Pareidolia, clustering illusion and illusory correlation

Answer 25

• Different ways for us to see patterns where none actually exist
• we see Jesus’s face in toast, not toast in jesus

Question 26

What are primacy and recency effects?

Answer 26

• We remember the beginnings and endings better than other parts (the middle)
• Long string of numbers: we remember the ones at the end very well and the ones at the beginning a little less well but the ones in the middle we don’t know
• Tested with Colonoscopy: made the end a little more pleasant, people gave in more regularly for check ups

Question 27

What is the just world phenomenon?

Answer 27

-If you think the world is ultimately a just place (everything happens for a reason), you will have a tendency to look for reasons to blame victims of inexplicable injustices ( a bad thing happening to a good person violates your belief that the world is just so you look for evidence to support the belief you want to hold onto- confirmation bias)

Question 28

What is actor observer bias?

Answer 28

• The tendency to explain the behaviour of others in terms of stable traits
• And to explain ones own actions in terms of reactions to the situation ( if you get cut off while driving we say theyre an asshole, and if we cut someone off we were just in a rush) (kind of the opposite for something good)