Cognitive heuristics

Chabris and Simon

paying attention to one thing can make you blind to - the obvious - our own blindness This creates bias

Combs and Slovic 1979 (availability heuristic example)

people's frequency estimates of causes of death correlate with how often such causes are reported in the media

Anchoring as a priming effect - Musweller 2000

"Is the annual mean temperature in Germany higher or lower than 20 degrees C (or 5 degrees C?)" Those shown 20C found it easier to recognize words like sun and beach Those shown 5C found it easier to recognise words like frost and ski

Lilienfield and Lynn, 2014

- Even intelligent, well-mannered and well-trained mental health professionals can fall prey to disastrous ways of thinking - confirmation bias

Heath & Tindale 2013

- Heuristics have been criticised for not being researched in realf life settings - examples of real life availability heuristic - example of representativeness heuristic - example of anchoring and adjustment heuristics These examples also show implications that this research can prevent in behaviour

Availability Heuristic Heath and Tindale 2013

- Holtgrave et al - Jussim et al

Tversky and Kahneman 1974 - anchoring and adjustment

- Participants stood in front of a Wheel of Fortune marked from 1-100, asked to spin the wheel - Wheel rigged to stop at either 10 or 65 - Asked "What is your best guess of the percentage of African Nations in the UN?" Results - Mean estimates of those who saw WOF stop at 10 = 25% - Mean estimates of those who saw WOF stop at 65 = 45%

Moskowitz 2005

Heuristics are only useful when we have uncertainty or too much effort is required to to arrive at suitable judgement - can be a source of bias otherwise

Satisficers

Making adequate (but not great) inferences and decisions

Availability heuristic

A cognitive shortcut that allows us to draw upon information about how quickly information comes to mind about a particular event to deduce the frequency or likelihood of this event - e.g. how many plastic surgeons have succumbed to plastic surgery in the past few years

Anchoring and Adjustment

A cognitive shortcut that makes us place weight upon initial standards/schemas (anchors) and as a result means we may not always adjust sufficiently far from these anchors to provide accurate judgements

Representativeness heuristic

A mental shortcut whereby instances are assigned to categories on the basis of how similar they are ti the category in general - e.g ignoring average popularity of courses (base rate) and using inaccurate personality sketches instead - Tversky and Kahneman (1974)

Associative bonds are strengthed by repetition. Strength of association serves as a basis of judgement

Availability heuristic takes advantage

Heath and Tindale 2013 - Holtgrave

Availability heuristic tends to lead people to overestimate rare and vivid events and underestimate more frequent common events e.g. nuclear accident risk vs car exhaust risk

representativenes heuristic Heath and Tindale 2013

Clinical diagnoses of psychological disorders are often based more on the perceived similarity between the client and 'prototypical' patient than on the appropriate DSM 5 criteria - also applies to prototypical criminal and jury-descision making too

Heuristics

Cognitive shortcuts - Computers search endlessly for most probable consequence/outcome to find perfect solutions however we don't have the time or cognitive resources to do this which is why use heuristics to make decisions (not always the correct ones)

Tversky and Kahneman 1974 - representativeness

Estimate the probability that a man was either an engineer or lawyer Man sampled at random from a group of engineers and lawyers Some told: 70% engineers, 30% lawyers Others told 30% engineers, 70% lawyers Some got (useless personality profile) Some didn't - When people didn't get a personality profile....estimates reflected base rates - When they did get the profile, they became less rationale and ignores base rate information and essnetially guessed (50/50 judgements)

Albert & Steinberg 2011

In contexts that activate adolescents' increasingly rich and salient social schemas, heuristic processing appears to gain influence over the course of development

Reputation heuristic - Metzger and Flanagin (2013)

Involves inappropriately appealing to authority. Takes advantage of a human tendency that prestigious people cannot be wrong - Koh and Sundar, 2010

What we aim to achieve

Make a decision that is most likely to deliver the benefits we desire

Sundar 2009

Manipulated website content cues such as ratings and sales rank to affect bandwagon perceptions - Higher bandwagon perceptions resulted in significantly higher rating of product credibility and purchase intent - from ps

Ease of retrieval, Schwarz 1991

Ps recall 6 or 12 assertive behaviours, judge their own behaviours - Those only recalling six rated themselves as more assertive compared to those recalling 12 - Recalling 12 is harder

System 2

Requires attention and effort e.g. fill out a tax form similar to optimisers and uses base rate information

The law of small numbers

Smaller samples can yield more extreme results more often than larger samples - e.g. kidney cancer and gender of babies born in hospital

The endorsement heuristic - Metzger and Flanagin 2013

Suggests that people are more likely to believe information and sources if others do also - Sundar 2009

Confirmation bias

The tendency to seek out evidence that is consistent with hypotheses - can be associated with anchoring and adjustment e.g. focuses on initial information and does not adjust enough away from it when presented with conflicting information

credibility - Metzger and Flanagin 2013

affected by availability heuristic - credibility may now rest on how many times we have seen that article - doesn't take into account the source

Tversky and Kahneman 1973

associated with availability heuristic - Gender with more famous names were judged to be more frequent and participants recalled 50% more names of that gender

credibiltiy

believability of a source

Heath and Tindale 2013

discuss teachers' use of available information e.g. vivid memories of siblings as former students in predicting the performance of current students

Anchoring and adjustment heuristic example in Heath and Tindale 2013

environmental risks - New environmental risks are often based on information from other related risks or from similar risks in different locations - However, many different factors to consider - Thus it is quite likely that such estimates show insufficient adjustment and lead to biased appraisals

Koh and Sundar 2010

experimentally manipulated website authority and found significantly higher trust ratings for sites considered more authoratitive

Bandwagon perceptions

how likely others are to buy product

Metzger et al 2010

includes 109 ps who took pat in 1/11 focus groups confirmed that information rich environment (such as the internet) meant ps rarely had cognitive capacity or time to ecaluate information

System 1

uses heuristics and biases. E.g allows you to orient the source of sudden - doesn't require too much attention/conscious thinking - similar to being a satisficer

Limited budget of attention

we have a ..... If tasks exceed this then they will fail

Optimisers

what we aim to be - Drawing the best possible inferences and hence reaching the best possible descisions (March and Simon, 1958)

Schwarz 1991

when instructing people to think like 'statistician' enhanced use of base rate information but think like a clinician had opposite effect - overcomes representativeness heuristic