Lecture 9: Decision Making Flashcards
1
Q
What is decision making?
A
- making a judgment among a set of options
2
Q
What is reasoning?
A
- coming to a conclusion based on given premises which we assume to be true
- involves coming to a conclusion based on given premises or observations which we assume to be true
→ rationalism/a priori/deduction
→ empiricism/a posteriori/induction
3
Q
What are categorical syllogisms?
A
- involve drawing a conclusion from two statements that we assume are true
- when we cannot draw a logical conclusion from a syllogism it is indeterminate
- solved using mental/situational models
4
Q
What are Euler circles?
A
- represent alternative to mental models
5
Q
What limits mental models used to solve syllogisms?
A
- working memory
- prior knowledge
- visual imagery
6
Q
What is conditional reasoning?
A
- logical determination of whether the evidence supports, refutes, or is irrelevant to the stated if-then relationship
- set of propositions given using an “if… then…” structure
→ asked to draw a logical conclusion from the propositions - antecedent (“if…”) and consequent (“then…”)
7
Q
What are the two valid actions in a conditional reasoning task?
A
- affirm the antecedent (modus ponens)
- deny the consequent (modus tollens)
8
Q
What is the Wason Selection Task?
A
- each card has letter on one side, number on other
→ if card has a vowel on one side, then even number on other
→ must flip over a vowel (affirm antecedent) and odd number (deny consequent)
9
Q
What is a confirmation bias?
A
- tendency to look for information that supports a claim and avoid information that refutes it
10
Q
What did the Wason Selection Task show about the difficulty of reasoning tasks?
A
- more difficult if they involve abstract concepts
- we can use pragmatic reasoning schemas to help reduce the resources required to solve the task
11
Q
What is the belief-bias effect?
A
- tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion
12
Q
What is inductive reasoning?
A
- based on observations of the world
→ make inferences about what is likely true - impossible to find a logically certain conclusion
→ limited by probability guesses
13
Q
What is expected utility theory?
A
- assumes people are rational and want to make optimal choice
- based on subjective utility or subjective probability
14
Q
What is subjective utility?
A
- prefer one thing over another by seeing the utility of its outcomes
- in decision making, “I’ll go hang out with them because they can help me with class later”.
15
Q
What is subjective probability?
A
- guess of an outcome of a process
- in decision making, “I’ll stay home because I can study better by myself”.
16
Q
What is the availability heuristic?
A
- classic heuristic
- judge frequency based on ease of retrieval from memory
→ affected by recency, familiarity, saliency - i.e. words with “e” or “k” as last letter
17
Q
What is the simulation heuristic?
A
- classic heuristic
- estimation of likelihood of a particular scenario rather than a list of examples
→ likelihood you will turn out to be a motivational speaker v. clinical psychologist - related to counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias
18
Q
What is counterfactual thinking?
A
- dwelling on outcomes that didn’t happen
- what if’s tend to concern action rather than inaction
→ if Bill placed a bet on a horse winning and lost $40 and Ken failed to place a bet on a horse and missed out on $40, Ben is judged to feel worse about his decision
19
Q
What is the representativeness heuristic?
A
- classic heuristic
- judge likelihood based on how similar it is to the population from which it was drawn or process that produced it
→ that is, we judge A’s belongingness to B based on how much it resembles B
→ also judgments of randomness - i.e. births in small hospital v. large hospital, jobs of people, etc.
20
Q
What was Kahneman & Tversky’s study on birth order?
A
- People would guess birth order in cities, like B G B G B or B G B B B
→ all equally likely but latter judged as less likely
21
Q
What is the base-rate fallacy?
A
- reliance exclusively on category representativeness and ignore information about the actual rates in which events occur
22
Q
What is the conjunction fallacy?
A
- assuming two things are more likely together than apart based on category representativeness
23
Q
Why do people still rely on heuristics?
A
- tractable → people can mentally keep track of everything they need to use
- robust → provide reasonable answers under a wide range of circumstances
24
Q
What is the satisficing heuristic?
A
- select the first option that satisfied a criterion
25
What is the recognition heuristic?
- select the option we recognize
26
What is the "take the best" heuristic?
- combines recognition and satisficing
| → seeing two options, select the one that first satisfies the criterion
27
What is the knowledge and cognitive limitations involved with reasoning?
KNOWLEDGE
→ strategy knowledge (from error)
→ belief-bias
→ pragmatic reasoning schemas
COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS
→ confirmation bias (search errors)
→ mental model updating
28
What is the knowledge and cognitive limitations involved with decision making?
KNOWLEDGE
→ simulation heuristic
→ counterfactual reasoning
→ hindsight bias
COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS
→ conjunction fallacy
→ fast and frugal heuristics
29
What is an algorithm?
- specific solution procedure, often detailed and complex, that is guaranteed to furnish the correct answer if it is followed correctly
→ i.e. a formula
30
What was Kahneman & Tversky's study on representativeness using hospitals?
- large and small hospital have 50% birth rates for each sex, which had more days where 60%+ were more?
→ most people said the same
→ but the smaller hospital would be more likely
- shows insensitivity to sample size bias
31
What is Bayes's theorem?
- estimates should be based on two kinds of information
→ base rate
→ likelihood ratio, i.e. assessment of usefulness of the new information
32
What is the anchoring and adjusting heuristic?
- influences the way people intuitively assess probabilities
- people start with an implicitly suggested reference point (the "anchor") and make adjustments to it to reach their estimate
33
What is the simulation heuristic?
- mental construction or imagining of outcomes
| → forecasting of how some event will turn out or how it might have turned out under another set of circumstances
34
What is a downhill change?
- we alter an unusual story element, substituting a more typical or normal element in its place
→ part of counterfactual thinking
→ alter/undo unusual story elements for more normal stuff
- allusion to skiing, where it's easiest to go downhill
35
What is hindsight bias?
- the after-the-fact judgment that some event was very predictable, even though it wasn't
36
What is the distance effect/discrimination effect?
- greater difference between two stimuli = faster decision that they differ
37
What is the semantic congruity effect?
- decision is faster when the dimension being judged matches or is congruent with the implied semantic dimension
- i.e. asking which balloon is "higher" because instinctively we think of balloons as floating objects so high = height; or asking which yo-yo is "lower"
38
What is the SNARC effect (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes effect)?
- judgments about smaller numbers are made more quickly with the left hand and judgments about larger numbers are made more quickly with the right hand
39
What is the prototypicality heuristic?
- strategy in which we generate examples to reason out an answer rather than follow the correct, logical procedures of deductive reasoning
