Lecture 12. judgements decisions and reasonings

Question 1

What are the three agreed upon heuristics?

Answer 1

Representative
Availability
Affect

Question 2

Why was anchoring not considered a heuristic?

Answer 2

there was no question substitution in regards to this heuristic

Question 3

What is the heuristics and biases program? What does heuristics mean? what does biases mean?

Answer 3

The heuristics and biases programs central idea is that judgement and decision making often rests on simplifying heuristics instead of extensive algorithmic processing.

a heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect answers to difficult questions

A bias is a systematic error of judgement

Question 4

Kahneman and Tversky saw very strong importance in heuristics. Steven pinker thought what?

Answer 4

That heuristics are one of the most important contributions to human life from psychology

Question 5

What did herbie simon do?

Hint: he was a forebear in heuristics

Answer 5

He came up with bounded rationality and satisficing

Satisficing - using experience to construct an expectation of how good a solution we might achieve and halting search as soon as a solution is reached that meets that expectation

Question 6

Who the hell is Paul Mehl?

Answer 6

Statistics guy that showed that clinical prediction performs really poorly

Question 7

What did kahneman and tversky do with kahneman’s earlier work on perception?

Answer 7

Used the work on perception to work with judgement and decision making

Question 8

What is system 1 and system 2 in terms of judgement and perception? if they are characters what type of character would System 1 be? What type of character would system 2 be?

Answer 8

System 1 would be rash and fast and intuitive and automatic in decision making

“a system 1 kinda guy”

System 2 would be a more calculated and reflective kind of person, slower to make a decision, needed to weigh up all the options etc. Reflective, Slow, Conscious, Controlled.

Question 9

What is the name of Kahnemans book?

Answer 9

Thinking fast (1) and thinking slow (2)

Question 10

Would are additional characteristics system 2 work to?

Answer 10

Control, not saying stupid stuff, calculating arithmetic problems

Question 11

What type of test intentionally allows system 1 to create an immediate, and generally wrong, answer and system 2 to “lazily rubber stamp it”

Answer 11

the CRT, the cognitive reflection test

Question 12

What are the 3 general purpose heuristics?

Answer 12

Representativeness - an assessment of the degree of correspondence between a particular outcome vs a model. How much something represents or resembles something rather than the actual probability

Availability - factors that come to mind easily are assigned greater weight in the formulation of judgments. we judge likelihood/frequency of an event by the ease in which instances come to mind,

Affect - judgments are made in accordance with the intensity of the emotion felt

Question 13

So whats interesting about these 3 heuristics? Are we asking questions? Are we asking substituting question statements???

Answer 13

All “real” heuristics, representativeness, availability and affect have question substitutions that are made about them.

Question 14

What is the question substitution for representativeness?

Answer 14

When we are asked: “How likely is it that Tom is a computer science student”

We substitute: “How much does Tom resemble a computer science student”

Question 15

What is the system 1 substitution?

Answer 15

We substitute an easier and more quickly calculated question in place of a hard to compute element.

Question 16

How do we increase system 2 intervention?

Answer 16

Create greater cost/reward for p’pants to check intuitions

make sure p’pants do not have to perform multiple cognitive tasks

Question 17

What is the question substitution for the availability heuristic?
We are asked: “What percentage of Hollywood celebrities are divorced?”

Answer 17

We substitute: “How readily do examples of Hollywood divorces come to mind?”

Question 18

What is the question substitution for the affect heuristic?

We are asked: “How large are the benefits of nuclear power?

Answer 18

We substitute: “How do you feel about nuclear power?”

Question 19

Even though its not a real heuristic, what is the affect of the anchoring heuristic?

Answer 19

People start with an intuitive reference point (i.e. the anchor) and then go from there

Question 20

What are criticisms of K-T’s work?
i.e. what do the biases lack?

heuristics have been vaguely specified and lack what?

K-T overstate the problems caused by the what of the brain?

Answer 20

Biases lack external validity

heuristics have been vaguely specified and lack formal modelling

KT overstate the problems caused by the computational limitation of the brain

Question 21

In terms of external validity, what are the issues with heuristics?

Answer 21

the effect of heuristics can be reduced by differently phrasing questions, making the issue not as transferable

the criticism suggests that heuristics might be artefacts of experimental design, results might not generalise

Question 22

Who was a major opponent of KT?

Hint: He was a German banjo player

Answer 22

Gigerenzer

Question 23

Given Gigernezer’s criticism of KT’s work was that they were fairly vague and lacked formal modelling, what was the more specific criticism here?

Answer 23

Vagueness - could be spread thinly to explain a lot of things post hoc

Lack of formal modelling - very little quantitative results available through heuristics

Question 24

Heurtistics can criticize computational processes of the brain that simplify issues. What are two instances that this actually works well?

Answer 24

Fast and frugal methods can be better
“Recognition” heuristic (from gigerenzer) can be really effective. Inferring that the more recognised object has higher value can often yield valid results

Question 25

What heuristic did KT miss?

Answer 25

The affect heuristic!

Question 26

Whats the deal with the Linda question?

What heuristic does it relate to?

The question asks: Which of the following is more probable?

What do we ask instead?

Answer 26

This relates to the Representative heuristic.

It is asked: Which of the following is more probable?

We ask, “What does linda resemble more?”

Question 27

Insensitivity to sample size size is a _____ heuristic?

Answer 27

representativeness heuristic. Probability judgements are substituted with assessments of resemblance. System 1 will respond with how much something represents the questions

Question 28

What heuristic does the Linda question correspond to?

Answer 28

The representativeness heuristic, because we look at what we think Linda represents, rather than the probability that she is something.

This is also known as the conjunction fallacy.

Question 29

What does the conjunction fallacy mean?

Answer 29

The conjunction fallacy (also known as the Linda problem) is a formal fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.

Conjunction definition: the action or an instance of two or more events or things occurring at the same point in time or space. joining together probability and representativeness

Question 30

With representativeness/conjunction fallacy? What is the issue here? What are we evaluating as the same thing when we shouldnt be?

Answer 30

We consider mean rank of likelihood and mean rank of similarity as being the same thing when they are very different

Question 31

The tennis thingy, when we rank something seems true, Borg coming out on top, as more likely, but it is less probable than something else, what is going on here?

Answer 31

Conjunction fallacy! Representativeness heuristic

Question 32

What is underlying crux of Insentivity to sample size?

Answer 32

Larger samples are more likely to represent the population, therefore the smaller sample size is more likely to return weird figures

Question 33

What test removed the perspective of probability and tested representativeness heuristic with dice

Answer 33

The dice experiment in which the more probable option occurring more often in a sequence, even when there is a lower number sequence that is contained in the other options

Question 34

What is the misperception of randomness bias?

Answer 34

We think “random” results should be more evenly distributed when in reality sequences can include the same result clumped together.

Randomness contains more repetitions than we think.

Question 35

What was the first ever paper that KT produced?

Belief in the law of ____ numbers.

Answer 35

The law of small numbers

too much faith in sample sizes

Question 36

What is the “hot hand”?

Answer 36

we think that by scoring, or winning a few times in a row, we’re more likely to win again.

Question 37

What has the engineer lawyer question got to do with?

Answer 37

Base rate neglect - the fact the we ignore the base rate/proportion when we hear useless information.

we ask ourself how much does this person sound like and engineer, as opposed what is the probability that this person is an engineer