Thinking 2- decision-making Flashcards
What causes a bias in human reasoning?
People using heuristics (cognitive short-cuts) to answer complex probabilistic questions
The Representativeness Heuristic, Kahneman & Tversky (1972)
“The likelihood of an event is evaluated by the degree to which it is representative the major characteristics of of the process or population from which it originates”
The assumption that representative or typical members of a category are encountered more frequently
The Representativeness Heuristic-experimental demonstrations
Judging professions by brief character desciptions
Conjunction fallacy
The conjunction or co-occurrence of two events cannot be more likely than the probability of either event alone
Occurs because specific scenarios appear more likely than general ones because they are more representative of how we imagine them
Gambler’s fallacy
The mistaken belief that future tosses of a coin are influenced by past evens
Kahneman & Tversky (1972) proposed that some sequences of events ‘represent’ our conception of “randomness’ better than others
The availability heuristic
The rule of thumb in which “decision makers assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind”
The availability heuristic examples
Which is more likely questions
Most people get the answers wrong because more information is available about the wrong answer, largely because of media coverage
It is a memory effect
The availability heuristic, Combs & Slovic
Looked at actual reporting of different forms of death in newspapers
Diserase kills 16x as many people as accidents but newspapers report 7x more people dying due to accidents
The availability heuristic, Rody & Sicily, 1979)
Individuals tend to overestimate their relative contributions to collaborative tasks
