Cognitive Psyc Ch 13

* However, for the other causes of death, a substantial proportion of subjects misjudged their relative likelihood. In these cases, large number of errors were associated with causes that had been _________ by the media.

Publicized

* If reasoning from conditional syllogisms depend only on applying rules of formal logic, then it wouldn't matter whether the syllogism was stated in terms of abstract symbols, such as p and q, or in terms of real-world examples, such as studying or cities. However, research shows that people are often better at judging the validity of syllogisms when ________________ substituted for _____________.

Real-world examples; abstract symbols

* Why is the concrete task easier than the abstract task? According to Griggs and Cox, the beer/drinking-age version of the task is easier because it involves _______________________.

Regulations people are familiar with

* Jay reads a lot and likes to talk. If you guess that he is a professor, then you are using ___.

Representativeness heuristic

* Tom is masculine, wears training pants, and regularly goes to a gym. If we judge the probability that Tom is a professional bodybuilder to be quite high because the description resembles our stereotype of a professional bodybuilder, we are using the __________________.

Representativeness heuristic.

Heuristics refers to...

"rules of thumb" that are likely to provide the correct answer to a problem but are not foolproof

* When they were told that "20 out of every 100 patients similar to Mr. Jones are estimated to commit an act of violence," ______% refused to discharge him. However, when told that "patients similar to Mr. Jones are estimated to have a 20% chance of committing an act of violence," ______% refused to discharge him.

41; 21

* For example, if people believe it would be very disturbing to lose $100 but only slightly pleasant to win $100, then this would cause them to decline a bet for which the odds are _________, such as flipping a coin (win $100 for heads; lose $100 for details). In fact, because of this effect, some people are reluctant to take a bet in which there is a 50% chance of winning $200 and a 50% chance of lowing $100, even though in accordance with utility theory, this would be a _______ bet.

50-50; good

* In a study that asked physicians whether they would prescribe arthritis medication to a hypothetical 67-year-old patient, _____ percent opted to prescribe medication when their choice was to prescribe a specific medication or not to prescribe anything. However, when a second possible medication was added, so the choice became whether to prescribe medication I, medication 2, or nothing, ____ percent opted to prescribe medication. Apparently, being face with a more difficult decision can lead to making ___________.

72; 53; no decision at all.

* Here's the Wason four-card problem with the following rule, "If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side." Suppose you are presented with four cards as follows: [A, 2, M, 13], each showing one side of each of the four cards. To see if the rule is valid, you would have to turn over the cards showing _____________.

A and 13

* While computers (e.g., Netflix) use __ for decision making, humans use __. Unfortunately, Human-way is ____.

Algorithm; Heuristic; not foolproof

* A stereotype about the characteristics of a particular group may lead people to pay particular __________ to behaviors associated with that stereotype, and this creates an illusory correlation that reinforces the stereotype. That is, the stereotype-related behaviors would be remembered better and more "available", reinforcing the stereotype. ... Whatever the reason, selectively taking into account only the situation that ________ the person's preconceptions can create the illusion that a correlation exists, when there may be only a weak correlation or none at all.

Attention; supports

* Because of the ___________, we are more likely to overestimate the risk of pregnancy than the risk of asthma.

Availability (of specific cases) heuristic

* If you overestimate the risk of car travel while underestimate the risk of airplane travel because of numerous recent news reports on car accidents with relatively less reports on aircraft accidents, then, you are demonstrating the ______.

Availability heuristic

* In the abstract task, the goal is to indicate whether an abstract statement about letters and numbers is true. But in the beer/drinking-age task, the goal is to be sure that a person has permission to drink alcohol. Apparently, activating the permission schema helps people focus attention on the card that would ________ that schema. Subject's attention is attracted to the "16 year old" card because they know that "Beer" on the other side would _________ the rule that a person must be 19 years old to drink.

Test (falsify); violating

* But after noting these new developments, he (Donders) turns to the lab director and says, "Amazing technology, but what I really want to know is have you figured out a way to measure the operation of the mind directly?" The lab director answers, "Well, no. We measure behavior and physiology and infer what is happening in the mind." "Oh," says Donders, "so the technology has changed, but besides that, nothing's different. Studying the mind is still involves measuring indirectly, hypothesizing, and inferring." "___________," says the lab director.

That's right

* Cosmides and Tooby found that subjects' performance was high on this task (correctly indicating it was necessary to turn over the "Eats Cassava roots" and the "No tattoo" cards), even though the rule was unfamiliar. They also ran other experiments in which subjects did better for statements that involved _____________ than for other statements that could not be interpreted in this way.

Cheating

* Sometimes controversies such as this one are frustrating to read about because, after all, aren't we looking for "answers"? But another way to look at controversies is that they illustrate the ____________ of the human mind and the challenge facing cognitive psychologists.

Complexity

* He likes me! Look he's smiling when I'm around! (when he's actually smiling at the girl next you) This is most related to the _____.

Confirmation bias

* In contrast, subjects who didn't guess the rule correctly on their first try tended to keep creating sequences that ___________ their current hypothesis.

Confirmed

* Jay reads a lot & likes to talk & majored in cog psych. Which of the following is the most likely?

He works at a company.

* Intuitive decision-making process based on past experiences is called _______ which is _______.

Heuristic, not foolproof

* When people use past experience to guide present behavior, they often use shortcuts to help them reach conclusions rapidly. After all, we don't have the time or energy to stop and gather every bit of information that we need to be 100 percent certain that every conclusion we reach is correct. These shortcuts take the form of ____________ - "rules of thumb" that are likely to provide the correct answer to a problem but are not foolproof.

Heuristics

* But if we look at the four programs closely, we can see that they are identical pairs (Figure 13.7). ... These results illustrate the ____________ - decisions are influenced by how the choices are stated, or framed.

framing effect

* People favor one option over the other depending on how the two options are described even though the two options are essentially the same. Such phenomenon is called ____________.

framing effect

* The availability heuristic doesn't always lead to errors, however, because there are many situations in which we remember events that actually do occur __________.

frequently

inductive reasoning

reasoning based on observations, or reaching conclusions from evidence

the ___________ heuristic states that the probability that A is a member of class B can be determined by how well the properties of A resembles the properties we usually associate with class B

representative

opt-in procedure

requires the person to take an active step to become an organ donor

* While the availability heuristic is related to (how easily we remember specific events and) how often we expect events to occur, the representativeness heuristic is related to the idea that people often make judgments based on how much one event _____________ another event.

resembles

* Expected emotions are one of the determinants of ____________ - the tendency to avoid taking risks. One of the things that increases the chance of risk aversion is the tendency to believe that a particular loss will have a _______ impact than a gain of the same size (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991).

risk aversion ; greater

how are stereotypes related to the availability heuristic?

selective attention to the stereotypical behaviors make these behaviors more "available"

* Applying this idea to cognition, it follows that a highly adaptive feature of the mind would, through the course of evolution, become a basic characteristic of the mind. One such characteristic, according to the evolutionary approach, is related to ____________, which states that an important aspect of human behavior is the ability for two people to cooperate in a way that is beneficial to both people.

social exchange theory

reasoning refers to...

the process of drawing conclusions

decisions

the process of making choices between alternatives

the base rate refers to...

the relative proportion of different classes in the population

risk aversion refers to...

the tendency to avoid taking risks

the falsification principle

to test a rule, it is necessary to look for situations that would falsify the rule

* Although this idea makes for more interesting reading, and may be one of the reasons the book is so popular (in addition to Kahneman's talent for relating psychological theory to everyday life), it is important to realize that these two systems are, in fact, two different ________ of processing. They are not characters in your head but are the result of complex, interconnected, and distributed processing that is served by many areas of the brain and result in many different behavioral outcomes.

types

* Post suggests that one reason for this behavior on the part of contestants who are doing poorly is that they want to avoid _______________. They therefore take more risks in the hope of "beating the odds" and coming out ahead in the end.

The negative feeling of being a loser.

* Learner's proposed reasons for setting buying and selling prices are hypothetical, but whatever the reasons, this study and others support the idea that a person's __________ can influence economic decisions.

mood

utility refers to...

outcomes that achieve a person's goals

* People tend to _______ the ______ feeling after a bad consequence in the future.

overestimate; negative

* When the "abstract" version of the Wason four-card problem is compared to a "concrete" version of the problem (in which beer, soda, young boy, and old man 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/soda" version of the Wason problem, because it encourages to use __________.

permission schema; falsification rule

* The explanations for these misjudgments appears linked to __________. When you try to think of words that begin with r or that have r in the third position, it is much _________ to think of words that begin with r (run, rain, real) than words that have r in their third position (word, car, arranged). When people die of botulism or in a tornado, it is front-page news, whereas deaths from asthma go virtually unnoticed by the general public. This example illustrates how the availability heuristic can mislead us into reaching the wrong conclusion when ______ frequently occurring events stand out in our memory.

Availability; easier; less

* Post found that if things are going well for the contestant (they have opened a number of small money briefcases) and the bank begins offering more and more, the contestant is likely to ___________________. In contrast, when contestants are doing poorly (having opened a number of large money briefcases, taking those amounts out of play) and the bank's offers go down, they are likely to __________________.

Be cautious and accept a deal early; Take more risks and keep playing

* It is fitting, therefore, that in this, the last chapter of the book, we are now describing a task that involves mental processes far more complex than judging whether a light has flashed, but that illustrates exactly the same principle: the workings of the mind must be inferred from ______________.

Behavioral observations

* The results, in figure 13.6, show that slightly more than half of the physicians in the control and serious conditions recommended a cesarean delivery. However, 75% recommended a cesarean when the test case was preceded by the nonserious cases. Apparently, the test case was perceived to be more serious when preceded by uncomplicated cases that didn't require special actions. What this means, if there results were to translate into an actual medical situation, is that a patient's chances of undergoing a cesarean section _________________________.

Can be influenced by the immediately prior experiences of the physician.

* However, in doing this they violated the ____________ rule, which states that the probability of a conjunction of two events (A and B) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents (A alone or B alone). Because there are more bank tellers (A) than feminist bank tellers (B), stating that Linda is a bank teller includes the possibility that she is a feminist bank teller.

Conjunction

* Why do people overestimate what their negative feelings will be? One reason is that when making their prediction, they don't take into account the __________________________.

Coping mechanisms they may use to deal with adversity.

* Related to people's tendency to do nothing when faced with the need to opt in is the status quo bias - the tendency to ____________ when faced with making a decision... In both cases, most drivers stick with the __________ option.

Do nothing; default

* What we're looking for when testing any rule is an example that _________ work. As soon as we find such an example, we can conclude that the rule is false. This is the _______________: to test a rule, it is necessary to look for situations that would falsify the rule.

Doesn't; falsification principle

* The secret to determining the correct rule is to try to create sequences that _______ satisfy the person's current hypothesis, but _____ satisfy Wason's rule.

Don't; do

* Daniel Kahneman (2011), in this best-selling book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, uses the bat and ball example to illustrate the ________________ to thinking; the idea that there are two mental systems - a fast, automatic, intuitive system, which Kahneman calls System I, which may have seduced you into the 10 cent answer, and a slower, more deliberative, thoughtful system called System 2, which you would have used if you had thought about the problem more carefully.

Dual systems approach

* When faced with a choice, we are often guided by what we remember from the past. The availability heuristic states that events that are more ________ remembered are judged as being more probable than events that are less ________ remembered.

Easily

* Much of the early theorizing on decision making was influenced by _______________, which assumes that people are basically ________. According to this theory, if people have all of the relevant information, they will make a decision that results in the maximum expected utility, where utility refers to outcomes that achieve a person's goals

Expected utility theory; rational

* Notice that before the experiment, the subjects predicted that the negative effect of losing $3 would be ____________ than the positive effect of winning 5$. ... The bars on the right show that the actual effect of losing was substantially _________ than predicted, but the positive effect of winning was only a little less than predicted. So, after their gamble, the positive effect of winning and negative effect of losing turned out to be about _______.

Greater; less; equal

* Although observing correlations between events can be useful, sometimes people fall into the trap of creating ___________. ____________ occur when a correlation between two events appears to exist, but in reality there is no correlation or it is much weaker than it is assumed to be. ____________ can occur when we expect two things to be related, so we fool ourselves into thinking they are related even when they are not.

Illusory correlations

* The low American consent rate for organ donation (28%) also occurs in other countries, such as Denmark (4%), the United Kingdom (27%), and Germany (12%). One thing that these countries have in common is that they all use an opt-in procedure (it requires the person to take an active step). However, in France and Belgium the consent rate is more than 99%. These countries use an opt-out procedure, in which everyone _______ a potential organ donor __________________.

Is; unless he or she requests not to be a donor

* We can understand why this result would occur by considering a statistical rule called the _________________, which states that the larger the number of individuals that are randomly drawn from a population, the _________________ the resulting group will be of the entire population.

Law of large numbers; more representative

* Lydia is 48 years old, 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 housewife.

* Apparently the description of Robert as wearing glasses, speaking quietly, and reading a lot __________ these people's image of a typical librarian. Thus, they were influenced by the fact that the description of Robert __________ their conception of what a librarian is like. However, they were ignoring another important source of information - the base rates of farmers and librarians in the population (the ______ rate).

Matched; matches; base

* What's going on here? One possibility is that people's prior beliefs may have caused them to focus on information that agreed with their beliefs and to disregard information that didn't. The tendency for people to generate and evaluate evidence and test their hypothesis in a way that is biased toward their own opinions and attitudes is called ___________ bias. This bias is a type of ___________ bias, which is broader than the myside bias because it holds for any situation (not just for opinions or attitudes) in which information is favored that confirms a hypothesis.

Myside bias; confirmation bias

* Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) are among psychologists who have an evolutionary perspective on cognition. They argue that we can trace many properties of our minds to the evolutionary principles of ______________. According to which, _____________ - characteristics that help organisms survive to pass their genes to the next generation - will, over time, become basic characteristics of the organism.

Natural selection; adaptive characteristics

* People tend to overestimate _______________________.

Negative feelings following a bad decision/consequence more so than positive feelings following a good decision/consequence.

* A similar approach was taken by Patricia Cheng and Keith Holyoak (1985), based on the idea that people think in terms of schemas - their knowledge about rules that govern their thoughts and actions. One of these schemas is a _______________, which states that if a person satisfies a specific condition (being of legal drinking age), then he or she gets to carry out an action (being served alcohol).

Permission schema

* The choice of Program A suggested that subjects were using a _____________. ... This represents a ____________, because certain death of 400 people is less acceptable than taking a 2 in 3 risk that 600 people will die.

Risk-aversion strategy; risk-taking strategy

* Tversky and Kahneman concluded that, in general, when a choice is framed in terms of gains (as in the first problem, which is stated in terms of saving lives), people use a _______________, and when a choice is framed in terms of losses (as in the second problem, which is stated in terms of losing lives), people use a _________________.

Risk-aversion strategy; risk-taking strategy

* Our main goal, however, is not simply to show that _______________________, but to consider ______________________________.

Stating a problem in real-world terms makes it easier; How researchers have used various ways of stating a problem to propose mechanisms that explain why the real-word problems are easier

* In Kremer's experiment, when subjects predicted how they would feel if they lost, they focused on losing $5 (the textbook has made a typo here, it should be $3), but after the outcome was determined, subjects who actually lost focused on the fact that they _____________.

Still had $2 left

* When subjects were asked to judge whether there are more words with r in the first position or the third, 70% responded that more words begin with r. In reality, three times more words have r in the ________ position.

Third

* Even though most people realize that in the long run the casino wins, the huge popularity of gambling indicates that many people have decided to __________________. Observations such as this, as well as the result of many experiments, have led psychologists to conclude that people do not follow the decision-making procedures proposed by __________________.

To patronize casinos anyway; expected utility theory

* Lucky contestants of the deal-no-deal tend to accept a banker's offer early while unlucky contestants tend to keep playing. This is because ____________.

Unlucky contestants want to avoid the negative feeling of being a loser and take more risks in the hope of beating the odds.

illusory correlations occur when...

a correlation between two events appears to exist, but in reality there is no correlation or it is much weaker than it is assumed to be

* One possibility is that the first statement conjures up images of 20 people being beaten up, whereas the second is a more __________ probability statement that could be interpreted to mean that there is only a small chance that patients like Mr. Jones will be violent.

abstract

* According to Post et al. (2008), lucky contestants tend to _____ while unlucky contestants tend to _____. However, the lucky contestants in the YouTube video ______.

accept a deal early; keep playing; kept playing until the end

stereotypes refer to...

an oversimplified generalization about a group or a class of people that often focuses on the negative

* When the option is stated in terms of gains, people tend to _____ risks; When the option is stated in terms of losses, people tends to ______ risks.

avoid; take

* The confirmation bias acts like a pair of _________ - we see the word according to rules we think are correct and are never dissuaded from this view because we seek out only evidence that confirms our rule.

blinders

* Brenda is watching a political debate. When her preferred candidate gets up to speak, she nods her head when he makes points with which she agrees. When he is saying things that she does not support, however, she simply turns away and talks to her roommate. Brenda's tendency to seek out information that is consistent with her beliefs is called the ____________.

confirmation bias

The ____________ states that the probability of a conjunction of two events (A and B) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents (A alone or B alone).

conjunction rule

* Note, however that the right kind of descriptive information can increase the accuracy of a judgment. ... When such information is available, then applying the representativeness heuristic can lead to __________ judgments.

correct

incidental emotions

emotions that are not caused by having to make a decision

* One of the most powerful effects of emotion on decision making involves ___________, emotions that people predict they will feel for a particular outcome.

expected emotions

* The Wason task has generated a great deal of research, because it is an "If... then" conditional reasoning task. One of the reasons researchers are interested in this problem is that when the problem is stated in real-world terms, performance ____________.

improve

* You tend to avoid risks if the option is stated ____ while taking risks if it is stated ____.

in terms of gains; in terms of losses

* One of the primary mechanisms involved in making judgments is __________ reasoning, which is reasoning based on observations, or reaching conclusions from evidence. ... Anytime we make a prediction about what will happen based on our observations about what has happened in the past, we are using __________ reasoning.

inductive

status quo bias

tendency to do nothing when faced with making a decision