Cog Psych Exam 3: Chapter 13

Of the following real-world phenomena, the confirmation bias best explains the observation that people

can cite several reasons for their position on a controversial issue but none for the opposing side.

Stereotypes are reinforced by all of the following EXCEPT

the falsification principle.

Donovan volunteers his time to campaign for Joel Goodman. He spent all afternoon putting up "Goodman for Congress" signs around his town and arrived back at Goodman headquarters just in time to watch the Goodman-Hernandez debate on TV. Donovan was eager to watch the candidates debate each other, even though he was 100% sure he was going to vote for Goodman. Donovan's first response to the debate will most likely be

"Did you hear how well Goodman answered that question on job creation?"

Lydia is 48 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and she participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which of the following alternatives is most probable?

Lydia is a U.S. Congresswoman.

Which of the following statements would most likely invoke the operation of a permission schema?

If I get an A on my cognitive psychology exam, I can go out with my friends Saturday night.

Which concept below is most closely associated with the evolutionary perspective to solving the Wason four- card problem?

Social-exchange theory

"You can't have any pudding unless you eat your meat," says a man to his son at the dinner table. This is an example of

a permission schema.

Jonas bought a new leather jacket after saving for many months for the luxury purchase. On the first day he went out wearing the new garment, he found a $50 bill on the sidewalk outside of his office. He now refers to the jacket as his "lucky jacket" and believes that it has some magical power to give him good fortune. Jonas's belief in the jacket's cosmic ability is an example of

an illusory correlation.

Mia has lived in New York City all her life. She has noticed that people from upper Manhattan walk really fast, but people from lower Manhattan tend to walk slowly. Mia's observations are likely influenced from a judgment error based on her using

an illusory correlation.

If a motorcycle cop believes that young female drivers speed more than other drivers, he will likely notice young female drivers speeding in the fast lane but fail to notice young male or older drivers doing the same. In this case, the police officer's judgments are biased by the operation of the

confirmation bias.

An experiment measures participants' performance in judging syllogisms. Two premises and a conclusion are presented as stimuli, and participants are asked to indicate (yes or no) if the conclusion logically follows from the premises. Error rates are then calculated for each syllogism. This experiment studies ____ reasoning.

deductive

If you are given the information that in order to vote in a presidential election, you must be at least 18 years of age, and that Will voted in the last presidential election, you can logically conclude that Will is at least 18 years old. This is an example of using ________ reasoning.

deductive

Cosmides and Tooby tested participants' ability to solve variations of the Wason problem, including ones containing stories about a particular culture. Their results showed that ____ is not always necessary for conditional reasoning.

familiarity

Cecile has dreamed of owning her own home for years, and she can finally afford a small cottage in an older neighborhood. She notices that she feels more positive about her home when she drives home by the abandoned shacks, but she hates her home when driving past the fancy mansions with their large lawns. Cecile's emotions are influenced by

framing.

There are two gumball machines outside the local grocery store, one large machine and one small machine. Both machines have only yellow and orange gumballs, and each machine contains 50 percent of each color. For each coin, the large gumball machine dispenses 15 gumballs, while the small machine dispenses 5. Tim is a young genius whose interests include probability and sound decision-making. His "probability project of the day" is to get a greater percentage of either of the colors, but not an equal amount of each color. Given this, and presuming Tim has only one coin,

he should use his coin in the small machine.

One reason that most people do not easily solve the original (abstract) version of the Wason four-card problem is that they

ignore the falsification principle.

Kirk is a generally anxious person. His anxiety sometimes gets in the way when he tries to make decisions. The anxiety Kirk feels is an example of an

incidental immediate emotion.

Making probable conclusions based on evidence involves _____ reasoning.

inductive

Bonnie has ordered her monthly supply of medicines through the mail for the past five years. Except for one order, all orders have arrived within two business days. Bonnie placed an order yesterday, and she expects to receive her order tomorrow. Bonnie is using

inductive reasoning.

The validity of a syllogism depends on

its form.

By using a(n) _____, a country could increase the percentage of individuals agreeing to be organ donors dramatically.

opt-out procedure

Utility refers to

outcomes that achieve a person's goals.

When the "abstract" version of the Wason four-card problem is compared to a "concrete" version of the problem (in which beer, soda, and ages are substituted for the letters and numbers),

performance is better for the concrete task.

The application of a(n) ____ makes it easier to solve the "drinking beer" version of the Wason problem.

permission schema

Imagine that your friend James has just taken up the habit of smoking cigars because he thinks it makes him look cool. You are concerned about the detrimental effects of smoking on his health, and you raise that concern to him. James gets a bit annoyed with your criticism and says "George Burns smoked cigars, and he lived to be 100!" You might point out that a major problem with his "George Burns" argument involves

sample size.

Mr. Huff always passes back exams to his algebra class in descending order (the highest grade is handed out first). Today, Maddelyn was the first to receive her exam. Joy complained, remarking, "Maddelyn, you always get the highest grade in algebra. It was true all last year and so far this year." Maddelyn was not sure if this was correct. To figure out if this was true, Maddelyn should

search her memory for instances when she did get her exam back first and for instances when she did not.

Many people receive unsolicited calls from telemarketers or unwanted "junk" mailers advertising offers for products such as cable or internet services or cellular phone companies. Most people do not consider these offers and do not make a change to the plans or services that they receive because they do not want to make a decision that requires serious consideration or thought. This is an example of the _______ bias.

status quo

The evolutionary approach proposes that the Wason problem can be understood in terms of people's

tendency to detect when others are cheating.

At a lunch meeting with a client, the CEO of Gossip Polls, Inc., was asked to determine America's favorite day of the week. Hundreds of Gossip employees across the U.S. started collecting data immediately, calling people at their residences. One hour later, the attitudes from 10,000 Americans, across all 50 states, were collected. A staff member called the CEO, still at her lunch meeting, to tell her the results of the poll: America's favorite day of the week is Monday. Given your text's discussion of inductive reasoning in science, we might suspect that the observations in this poll are not representative because

the people who are home to answer the phone in the early afternoon are not an appropriate cross-section of the U.S. population.

The conjunction rule states that

the probability of two events co-occurring is equal to or less than the probability of either event occurring alone.

People tend to overestimate

what negative feelings will occur following a decision more so than positive feelings.

One hundred students are enrolled in State University's course on introductory physics for math and science majors. In the group, 60 students are math majors and 40 are science majors. Sarah is in the class. She got all As in her high school science courses, and she would like to be a chemist someday. She lives on campus. Her boyfriend is also in the class. There is a ____ chance that Sarah is a science major.

40%

The rule of the Wason four-card problem is, "If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side." Let's say you are presented with A, 8, M, and 13, each showing on one of four cards. To see if the rule is valid, you would have to turn over the cards showing

A and 13.

Derrick purchased a new car, a Ford Mustang, less than a month ago. While sitting in traffic, Derrick says to his girlfriend, "Mustangs must be the best-selling car now. I can't remember seeing as many on the road as I have recently." Derrick's judgment is most likely biased by a(n)

availability heuristic

The finding that people tend to incorrectly conclude that more people die from tornados than from asthma has been explained in terms of the

availability heuristic

Wally and Sharon are out on a date. When Sharon asks Wally where they should go for dinner, Wally says "My coworkers keep telling me about that new Japanese place downtown, so it must be a great place to eat." Wally's response illustrates the use of a(n)

availability heuristic.

The tendency to think that a syllogism is valid if its conclusion is believable is called the ____ .

belief bias

Given its definition, expected utility theory is most applicable to deciding whether to

buy first class or coach tickets for a spring break trip.

Greg was recounting a fishing tale of the one that got away: "I had a huge ahi on my line. I fought for it for a few minutes, then my line snapped. The ahi swam away across the pond." Greg's friend, Matt, didn't believe his story because Matt knew that ahi are salt-water fish and aren't found in ponds. Greg's account contains

descriptive information that is inconsistent with base rate information.

Glinda is sure that if her boyfriend proposes, she will feel elation. This is an example of an

expected emotion.

Juanita is in a convenience store considering which soda to buy. She recalls a commercial for BigFizz she saw on TV last night. BigFizz is running a promotion where you look under the bottle cap, and one in five bottles has a voucher for a free soda. If Juanita decides to purchase a BigFizz based on this promotion, which is framed in terms of _____, she will use a _____ strategy.

gains; risk-aversion

Josiah is trying to decide whether or not to take a new job in a new city. The decision is creating a lot of anxiety in him, which is an example of an

integral immediate emotion.

Sanfey and coworkers' "ultimatum game" experiment revealed that people tended to make the ____ decision of ____.

irrational; accepting only high offers

Research in neuroeconomics has found that the function of the ______ may be to deal with the cognitive demands of a given task, while the ______ is responsible for handling emotional goals such as resenting an unfair outcome.

prefrontal cortex; insula

A syllogism is valid if

the conclusion follows logically from the two premises.

According to your text, the key to solving the Wason four-card problem is

the falsification principle.

Gabrielle is blonde, extremely attractive, and lives in an expensive condo. If we judge the probability of Gabrielle's being a model quite high because she resembles our stereotype of a model, we are using

the representative heuristic.

Failing to consider the law of large numbers most likely results in errors concerning

the representativeness heuristic.

In an experiment that combined both physiological and behavioral approaches to the study of decision making, PFC activity was recorded while participants accepted or rejected proposals to split a sum of money ($10). PFC activation was

the same for accepted and rejected offers.