Decision Making and Reasoning Flashcards

Question

What is the more common answer to this question : Which is more immoral? 1. A person who accidentally sets fire to a building 2. A person who sees a fire in a building but does not bother to report it.

Answer 1

- People tend to have more trouble reasoning with negative information - People tend to say the fire starter creates a worse outcome, but actually in both scenarios, there is a bad outcome

Answer 2

- A Do nothing and kill the five people - B Switch the train to another track and kill one man - People find the B to be more immoral, but it may actually lead to a better outcome : moral decision making - C Stop the trolley and save the five people by pushing a large man to his death in front of the trolley. Would you push him? - Although C is a utilitarian responses, many do not choose C due to adverse emotion

Answer 3

Ventromedial

Answer 4

Utilitarian

Answer 5

The tendency to think a syllogism is valid if the conclusions are believable - is more dominant on invalid than valid syllogisms

Answer 6

Few accepted unbelievable invalid syllogisms as valid, but they did accept believable invalid ones

Answer 7

“If P then Q” statements where P is the antecedent (conditional claim) and Q is the consequence (conclusion) How to test if the conditional statement “If it is raining, I will get wet” is valid? * What happens if Q is true? If I am wet, is it raining? not necessarily * What happens if P is false? If it isn’t raining, am I wet? No * What happens if Q is false? If I am not wet, is it raining? No

Answer 8

Confirmation bias : * Many do not test this statement correctly : many only turn over E to see if there is an even number on the other side * Very few turn over card ‘E’ and ‘5’ to test if a vowel = even number and if not even then not vowel

Answer 9

Tendency to seek confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis : forget to look at situation in which it could be false

Answer 10

You need to look for situations that would falsify a rule (conditional statement) * General logical rule to solve: “ If P then Q ”. * Choose the P card (is there a not-Q on the back?) and the not-Q card (is there a P on the back?). Eliminate false statements

Answer 11

- People show less confirmation bias with less abstract cards * If a person is drinking a beer (P), then the person is over 21 years old (Q) * Cards have age on one side and beverage on the other side Which card(s) do you need to flip to verify this statement? - The “drinking a beer” and “16 years old” Success rate in this went from 33% to 75%

Answer 12

Time judged returning on a route (which is now familiar) is rated as shorter than initial route.

Answer 13

Systematically inaccurate choices that don’t reflect a current situation that come from overuse of heuristics - Heuristics bias how we interpret information and judge frequency : diminish the nuance of our reasoning - Heuristics bias how we make predictions and assess outcomes

Answer 14

Probability that an item (person, object, event) is a member of a category based on resemblance : if it is a good enough match, I will assume it behaves exactly like the prototype

Answer 15

- You randomly select one male from the Canadian population and that male, Adam, wears glasses, speaks quietly and reads a lot. It is more likely Adam is a farmer or a librarian? Most people say librarian because of the representative bias and base rate neglect: ignore important rate information when reasoning * There are more farmers than librarians in Canada

Answer 16

- False assumption that a greater number of specific facts are more likely than a single fact. (e.g. Linda the bank teller) - **It is always the case that 2 events are less probable than a single event**

Answer 17

500 participants read scenarios that included two statements, one with single event and one with conjunction fallacy Scenarios were about three topics: * Participants with conspiracy beliefs more likely to make conjunction fallacies in COVID conspiracy scenarios than other topics

Answer 18

The easier it is to remember something, the more likely you’ll think it is to happen in the future (memory-based bias) : We confuse the availability of a memory for frequency E.g. Are there more words in the English language that begin with the letter R or with the letter R in the third letter?

Answer 19

Our memories (challenges) are recalled easier than other people’s memories experiences : we have better memories for our life’s obstacles, therefore we think our life is harder than other people

Answer 20

Biased by an initial value : will affect how you judge things to come * Participants given a random number between 0 and 100 * “Is this number higher or lower than the percentage of African nations in the United Nations?” * Those who were given a HIGH random number gave greater percent estimates than those given a LOW random number - We even anchor estimates to unrelated information (even when participants told the numbers were random)

Answer 21

The false belief that a predicted outcome of an independent event depends on past outcomes * We assume outcomes are linked when they are random * Thinking one is due for a ‘win’ after a run of ‘losses’

Answer 22

Linking two co-occurring events and assuming a relationship * Wearing a “Lucky” jersey when your sport team plays because they won last time you wore it

Answer 23

Thinking that a person who experiences success will keep having success, * ‘A winning steak’

Answer 24

learning from failures

Answer 25

Anticipate and prevent our mistakes before they result in catastrophe