Reasoning Flashcards
(22 cards)
Why do heuristics exist?
Because perfect decisions are impossible, information is limited and ambiguous (imperfect information)
Time for decisions is limited and cognitive resources are limited (limited resources)
Design features of a good heuristic
Efficient - get a lot of answers for not a lot of info
Quick - answer in quick time
Robust - usually works
Mostly right - more right than wrong
Net overall benefit - evolutionarily we reap more benefits over time from heuristics
What is a bias?
A systematic error produced from a heuristic
Representativeness heuristic
Evaluating possibilities according to the match between an event and the features of its parent population or generating process
Linda problem
Given description of Linda, asked which is more likely
A - she is a bank teller
B - she is a bank teller and she is an active feminist
Probability of one thing or two things
Most people say B due to the description BUT in terms of probability, the chance of one thing happening is always the same or more than the chance of more than one thing happening
Base rate
Background occurrence
Availability heuristic
Probabilities are assessed by the ease at which instances come to mind
Adjustment and anchoring heuristic
People will make an estimate and then adjust, irrelevant information can bias the initial estimate, and adjustments can be insufficient
Prospect theory (framing)
Kahneman and Tversky (1979)
Biases in people’s decisions often resulted from the fact that we do not treat gains and losses equally
We treat losses as more important than gains
We also tend to overweight low-probability outcomes and underweight high-probability outcomes
Conformation bias
The tendency to search for information which agrees with your already held views
Wason’s test
Participant presented with 4 cards, one side with colour and one with number
Asked which cards they need to turn to test a rule
Things which don’t help the Wason’s test
Motivation/reward
Changing the wording
University education
Metacognition
Knowledge of one’s own thoughts, and, importantly, of those cognitive factors which underlie one’s thinking (thinking about thinking)
Metacognitive error
Thinking you have made the right choice when it is wrong
Common metacognitive errors
Fluency
Mere exposure effect
Fluency
The ease at which a stimuli is processed
Mere-exposure effect
Zajonc’s term for the fact that our liking for something increases by simply being exposed to it
This also occurs whether the subject is aware of the exposure
Illusion of explanatory depth
Most people feel that they understand something in more detail than they do
Understanding is judged on familiarity rather than actual knowledge
Becomes sentient when they are asked to explain how something works
Rozenblit & Keil (2002)
Asked participants to rate how well they understood artefacts such as a sewing machine
They asked them to write a detailed description of how each thing works and then re-rate how they understood them
Ratings of self-knowledge dropped dramatically after they were asked to describe it in detail
Dunning-Kruger effect
People of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, thinking that their cognitive ability is greater than it is
Derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability people to recognise their own ineptitude, without self-awareness of metacognition, they cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence
Dutton and Aron (1974)
Young woman approached single men on a high arousing bridge and asked them irrelevant questions
Gave them her phone number and 80% rang her up and asked her one a date
Compared to non-arousing bridge where only 40% asked her on a date
Mental contamination
Relying on internal report to make a decision, on the bridge they misattributed their fear/arousal to liking the person
