W8: Judgement and Reasoning Flashcards
The activity of thinking: how do people learn from experience and how do they make decisions? Cognitive shortcuts used to make judgements and more sophisticated reasoning. Errors in logical reasoning and factors that influence these errors. * Availability and representativeness * Covariation * Two types of thinking * Confirmation and disconfirmation * Decision making (29 cards)
Heuristic
“Cognitive shortcuts” to make judgements. Efficient and often lead to sensible conclusions, but sometimes they can lead to error.
Covariation
Relates to cause and effect. Two variables are associated with one another.
Illusions from covariation
People often detect covariation even where there is none, because of the evidence people consider when judging covariation: in making these judgments, people seem to consider only a subset of the facts, and it’s skewed by their prior expectations. Selection of evidence is likely to be guided by confirmation bias.
Type 1 thinking
Simple. fast. Uses heuristics.
Type 2 thinking
Slower, more sophisticated way of thinking. Likely to come into play only if the circumstances are right and only if the case being judged contains the appropriate triggers for this form of reasoning.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to be more alert to evidence that confirms your beliefs rather than to evidence that might challenge them.
Judgement
The process through which people draw conclusions from the evidence they encounter, often evidence provided by life experiences.
Ignoring base-rate information
People rely only on the descriptive (diagnostic) information about the individual rather than base-rate information.
Example: lawyer or engineer?
Influence of chance on judgement
If the role of chance is big, people are more likely to realise that the “evidence” they’re considering may just be a fluke or an accident, not an indication of a reliable pattern. With this, people are more likely to pay attention to the quantity of evidence, on the sensible idea that a larger set of observations is less vulnerable to chance fluctuations.
Influence of education on judgement
A person’s quality of thinking is influenced by education. How well people think about evidence can be improved, and the improvement applies to problems in new domains and new contexts. Training in statistics, it appears, can have widespread benefits.
Inductive reasoning
Induction: the process in which you make forecasts about new cases, based on cases you’ve observed so far.
Deductive reasoning
Deduction: a process in which you start with claims or assertions that you count as “given” and ask what follows from these premises.
it helps keep your beliefs in touch with reality. Eg. Deduction leads you to a prediction based on your beliefs and the reduction turns out wrong - this indicates that something is off track in your beliefs.
Judgement
The process through which people draw conclusions from the evidence they encounter, often evidence provided by life experiences.
Base-rate info
Info about how frequently something occurs in general
Diagnostic information
Information about a particular case.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to be more alert to evidence that confirms your beliefs rather than to evidence that might challenge them.
A greater sensitivity to confirming evidence and a tendency to neglect disconfirming evidence.
Can take many forms.
Belief perseverence
Even when disconfirming evidence is undeniable, sometimes people don’t use it.
Evidence for belief perseverence
Rpss & Anderson (1982) - suicide note task and feedback.
Categorical Syllogisms
A type of logical argument that begins with two assertions (the problem’s premises), each containing a statement about a category, which can then be completed with a conclusion that may or may not follow from these premises.
Example:
- Leibniz worked with logic.
- I work with logic.
- I am Leibniz.
Categorical Syllogisms
A type of logical argument that begins with two assertions (the problem’s premises), each containing a statement about a category, which can then be completed with a conclusion that may or may not follow from these premises.
Invalid syllogism
When the conclusion does not follow from the premises stated in a categorical syllogism.
Example:
- Leibniz worked with logic.
- I work with logic.
- I am Leibniz.
Task used to examine people’s reasoning about condition statements
Conditional statements: “If X, then Y”, with the first statement providing a condition under which the second statement is guaranteed to be true.
Studied with the selection task (sometimes called the four-card task).
Belief Bias
If a syllogism’s conclusion happens to be something people believe to be true anyhow, they’re likely to judge the conclusion as following logically from the premises.
Conversely, if the conclusion happens to be something they believe to be false, they’re likely to reject the conclusion as invalid.
Utility maximisation
Refers to the value you put on a particular outcome. No matter how much you gain utility, the proposal is that you try to make decisions that will bring you as much utility as possible.
