Week 10 (Judgement & Decision making) Flashcards
What are the two types of theory of decision making?
What should we do (Mainly economics & mathematics)
-Normative theories
What do we do (mainly psychology)
-Descriptive theories
What are heuristics?
Efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information.
What do all heuristics rely on?
-Examining fewer cues
-Reducing the effort of retrieving cues
-Simplifying the weighting of cues
-Integrating less information OR examining few alternatives.
What is the availability heuristic?
-People estimate the likelihood or frequency by the ease of which examples can be brought to mind.
Recent or emotionally salient events are easier to recall, e.g., perceived risk of air travel rises in the immediate of an air disaster.
What is the representativeness heuristic?
Used to determine how likely it is that an event is a member of a category by considering how similar or typical the event is of the category.
E.g., may judge the likelihood that someone is a librarian by the extent to which that person resembles a “typical” librarian.
Who did an experiment for the representativeness heuristic?
Kanheman & Tversky in 1973
What is the conjunction fallacy?
Where a conjunction of two events is judged to be more likely than one of those events alone.
What is the anchor and adjust heuristic?
Used when people make estimates by starting an initial value and then adjust it to arrive at their final estimate.
Who did an experiment on the anchor and adjust heuristic?
Northcraft and Neale (1987)
What are Gigerenzer’s (1996) criticisms of Kahneman & Tvsersky
-Heuristic labels remain vague despite years of research
-Labels are merely descriptive, they don’t actually explain underlying cognitive processes.
-Ignores content and context
-Explain too little or too much
-No models to test.
What did Gigirenzer and Goldstein (1996) argue about heuristics?
That they are actually useful, we don’t just use them because we aren’t capable of doing anything else. Better than making chance decisions and leads to a satisfactory (but not perfect) answer.
What is reason?
It systematically departs from normative standards established by logic. Usually takes form of “if ___, then ____”
What is reason based on?
Premises and conclusions.
What are the two components of deductive reasoning?
Propositions: Statements about the world.
Connectives: Words that allow us to combine propositions into more complex sentences. “if” “not” “then”
Structure of a conditional statement
“if p then q”
p is the antecedent
q is the consequent
