Reasoning and Decision Making

Question 1

What are the four areas where human irrationality is often found?

Answer 1

• Reasoning about conditionals
• Reasoning about quantifiers
• Reasoning about probabilities
• Decision making

Question 2

What is reasoning about conditionals?

Answer 2

An assertion that if an antecedent (A) is true, then a consequent (B) must be true

Question 3

What occurred in Wason’s selection task for testing reasoning about conditionals?

Answer 3

• If a card has a vowel on one side it will have an even number on the other side
• participants found it easier to determine the other side of the card for even and vowel cards

Question 4

What is an aspect of reasoning about conditionals that is difficult to us?

Answer 4

when presented with neutral material people have particular difficulty in recognising the importance of exploring the negation of the consequent

Question 5

What is permission schema?

Answer 5

When the conditional statement is interpreted as a rule about what should be the case, performance on the Wason’s selection task tends to be enhanced

Question 6

What is probabilistic interpretation?

Answer 6

• People tend to select cards that will be informative under a probabilistic model, not a strict logical model
• This might be one reason why making the correct (=logical) choice in the original Wason’s selection task is so difficult

Question 7

What is reasoning about probabilities?

Answer 7

• Judgements of probability/frequency

Question 8

What factors may mislead our reasoning about probabilities?

Answer 8

• We can be biased in our estimates of probabilities when we must rely on factors such as memory and similarity judgements

Question 9

What occurs to make our decisions become illogical?

Answer 9

• Subjective utility - The subjective value someone places on something (It usually forms a non-linear function)