Social Psychology - Heuristics

The real probability of an event or what most people do _______ is often your best piece of evidence to make your guess

Base rate

Kahneman and Tversky: Lawyer Engineer Problem

Experimentally manipulated people's beliefs about base rates and then examined the impact of this manipulation. Participants were asked to assess, for each description, the probability that it belonged to an engineer rather than be a lawyer.

When do we use base rate information?

In the absence of descriptive information, when the base rate is presented before the descriptive information, when the base rate is more casually relevant to the judgment at hand

The Availability Heuristic

a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind. We are pulling information from our minds based on what we knew and have experienced

The Representative Heuristic

a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. Instances should resemble their category. Also, outcome should resemble their causes.

Anchoring and adjustment

a mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point and then adjust insufficiently from this anchor

Types of heuristics

availability heuristic, representativeness heuristic, anchoring and adjustment

Base rate information

information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Heuristics

mental shortcuts that are efficient and usually lead to good decisions in a reasonable amount of time

The Conjunction Fallacy

when we falsely believe that the outcome of two events is more likely or probable than the outcome of either event separately?