Thinking and Deciding (CH. 12)

Question 1

What is Frequency Estimate?

Answer 1

An essential step in judgment, in which someone makes an assessment of how often they have experienced or encountered a particular object or event

Question 2

What is Attribute Substitution?

Answer 2

A commonly used strategy in which a person needs one type of information but relies instead on a more accessible form of information. This strategy works well if the more accessible form of information is well correlated with the desired information. An example is the case in which someone needs information about how frequent an event is in the world and relies instead on how easily they can think of examples of the event

Question 3

What is Availability Heuristic?

Answer 3

A particular form of attribute substitution in which the person needs to judge the frequency of a certain type of object or the likelihood of a certain type of event. For this purpose, the person is likely to assess the ease with which examples of the object or event come to mind; this “availability” of examples is then used as an index of frequency or likelihood

Question 4

What is Representative Heuristic?

Answer 4

A strategy that is often used in making judgements about categories. This strategy is broadly equivalent to making the assumption that, in general, the instances of a category will resemble the prototype for that category and, likewise, that prototype resembles each instance

Question 5

Dual-Process Models of Decision Making

Answer 5

Type 2: slower, effortful thinking (more likely to be correct)

Type 1: fast and automatic thinking (relies on heuristics)

Question 6

What is Covariation?

Answer 6

A relationship between two variables such that the presence (or magnitude) of one variable can be predicted from the presence (or magnitude) of the other. Covariation can be positive or negative. If it is positive, then increases in one variable occur when increases in the other occur. If it is negative, then decreases in one variable occur when increases in the other occur

Question 7

What is Confirmation Bias?

Answer 7

A tendency to seek out, and accept without scrutiny, information and statements consistent with your belief

Question 8

Representativeness Heuristic: The Linda Problem, Which Option is More Likely?

Answer 8

Option 1: Linda is a bank teller
Option 2: Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement

“Bank teller and feminist” is just a subset of bank teller; therefore it cannot be more likely

Question 9

What is the Somatic Marker Hypothesis?

Answer 9

• Emotions are associated with different
  bodily (i.e., somatic) responses, such as
  increased heart rate and sweating for
  anxiety.
• When we notice these markers of
  emotion, it influences our decisions.
• Dependent of orbitofrontal cortex
  (OFC)

Question 10

What is Belief Perseverance?

Answer 10

A tendency to continue endorsing a belief even when disconfirming evidence is undeniable

Question 11

What is the Sunk Cost Fallacy?

Answer 11

An irrational tendency to continue an endeavor because of prior time, money, or effort costs

Question 12

What is Base-Rate Information?

Answer 12

Information about the broad likelihood of a particular type of event (also referred to as “prior probability”)

Question 13

What is Diagnostic Information?

Answer 13

Information about a particular case

Question 14

What is Induction?

Answer 14

A pattern of reasoning in which a person seeks to draw general claims from specific bits of evidence

Question 15

What is Deduction?

Answer 15

A process through which a person starts with claims, or general assertions, and asks what further claims necessarily follow from these premises

Question 16

What are Categorical Syllogisms?

Answer 16

A logical argument containing two premises and a conclusion, and concerned with the properties of, and relations between, categories. An example is “All trees are plants. All plants require nourishment. Therefore, all trees require nourishment.” This is a valid syllogism, since the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion

Question 17

What are Valid Syllogisms?

Answer 17

A syllogism for which the conclusion follows from the premise, in accord with the rules of logic

Question 18

What are Invalid Syllogisms?

Answer 18

A syllogism (such as a categorical syllogism, or a syllogism built on a conditional statement) in which the conclusion is not logically demanded by the premises

Question 19

What is Belief Bias?

Answer 19

A tendency, within logical reasoning, to endorse a conclusion if the conclusion happens to be something one believes is true anyhow. In displaying this tendency, people seem to ignore both the premises of the logical argument and logic itself, and they rely instead on their broader pattern of beliefs about what is true and what is not

Question 20

What is the Four Card Task?

Answer 20

An experimental procedure, commonly used to study reasoning, in which a person is presented with four cards with the certain information on either side of the card. The person is also given a rule that may describe the cards, and the person’s task is to decide which cards must be turned over to find out if the rule describes the cards or not

Question 21

What is Utility Maximization?

Answer 21

The proposal that people make decisions by selecting the option that has the greatest utility

Question 22

What is Framing?

Answer 22

In the context of decision making, a term referring to how the options for a decision (or, in some cases, the decision itself) are described. Often, the framing determines whether the decision is cast in terms of gains or positive attributes (e.g., what you might gain from this or that option), or whether the decision is cast in terms of losses or negative attributes