Chap 13 + cog demos

Decisions and Reasoning

• Decisions: The process of making choices between alternatives

• Reasoning: The process of drawing conclusions

• past knowledge effects our decisions & reasoning

Inductive Reasoning

• Reasoning that is based on observation

• Reaching conclusions from evidence

• happens in discussion section of paper

• ex: an hypothesis → deductive

• Strength of argument

  • Representativeness of observations → do they represent what ur trying to conclude about

  • Number of observations → normally use not a lot of observations

    • Law of large numbers: the larger the number of individuals randomly drawn from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire population

  • Quality of observations → did you get a good sense of what you saw?

• Used to make scientific discoveries

  • Hypotheses and general conclusions

• Used in everyday life

  • Make a prediction about what will happen based on observation [or what we heard] about what has happened in the past

  • Character – “one’s mental and moral qualities”

• What is Probably true, not what is definitely true.

  • conclusions are tenative

Heuristics

• “Rules of thumb” that are likely to provide the correct answer to a problem, but are not foolproof

  • quick ways of getting to conclusions

  • helpful but can lead us astray

• Two more commonly used heuristics include the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic

• Availability heuristic: events more easily remembered are judged as being more probable than those less easily remembered

  • when something is memorable we tend to over estmate its probability

• Illusory correlations: correlation appears to exist, but either does not exist or is much weaker than assumed → when something seems related but its not actually

  • Stereotypes: Oversimplified generalizations about a group or class of people that often focuses on the negative

• Representativeness heuristic: the probability that A is a member of class B can be determined by how well the properties of A resembles properties normally associated with class B → to know if something is in that category, we use characterisitics of that category => doesn’t take into account the ppl in the category

  • Use base rate (relative proportion of different classes in the population) information if it is all that is available

    • Base rate – how frequently does something occur in general.

  • Use descriptive information if available and disregard base rate information

  • ex: Rep Heu Examples

    • Sarah loves to listen to New Age music and faithfully reads her horoscope each day. In her spare time, she enjoys aromatherapy and attending a local spirituality group.

    • School Teacher? → but based on probability, more likely than this

    • Holistic Healer? → What she sounds like she should be in but is less probable

• Conjunction rule: probability of two events cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents

  • have both traits is less probable than just being 1 trait

• Law of large numbers: the larger the number of individuals randomly drawn from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire population

  • if small sample size (error) → more likely to be effected by error

• The myside bias: tendency for people to generate and evaluate evidence and test their hypotheses in a way that is biased toward their own opinions and attitudes

  • to generate

• The confirmation bias: tendency to selectively look for information that conforms to our hypothesis and overlook information that argues against it

  • to specific look for

  • can overlook information that go against your information

  • “cherry picking”

• The confirmation bias/myside bias

  • Lord and coworkers (1979)

    • Had those in favor of capital punishment and those against it read the same article → weren’t actually analyzing the article

      • Those in favor found the article convincing

      • Those against found the article unconvincing => just disagreeing bc not taking into account of other info

Decision-Making

• Decisions depend on how choices are presented

  • Opt-in procedure

    • Active step to be organ donor

    • ex: in US

  • Opt-out procedure

    • Organ donor unless request not to be

    • ex: in Europe

• Status quo bias

  • The tendency to do nothing when faced with making a decision → want things to stay the same

Oatley (2016)

• tested on what emotion are the eyes showing?

  • ppl who read fictions were more accuraye compared to ppl who read non-fiction

• fiction as a social simulation (invision text)

  • (visual) transportation

  • inferences

  • images

  • emotion

• fiction → simulate social inferences in a mental representation

  • since doesn’t say explicitly → makes you infer/have to guess what they were thinking

  • we have to infer:

    • what they look like (images)

    • what it feels like (emotions)

• fiction → allows for practice of social simulations

  • make them better when faced w/ it in real lifet

• fiction → has more variety of language (more descriptive) → when compared to non-fiction

• movies vs. reading

  • movies are more passive when attending to details

    • don’t have to infer as much bc of facial expressions

  • Reading makes you have to make connections to infer when attending to details

• neuro: emotion centers are being activated (mirroring)

  • same neural representation happening as character as if its happening to you

Mckay: about emotion & memory)

• binding-hypothesis

• remember color of taboo words more than neural words

  • bc we remember things tied to emotionality better

Burke: tip of tounge

• moves from semantic nodes to phonological nodes

  • ex: semantic knowlegde → phonological knowledge → muscle knowledge

  • w/ tip of tounge → word is stuck in semantic knowledge

    • failure of activation to move from the semantic levels to the other levels (phonological & muscle)

• factors that influence this:

  • frequency of word (commonality)

  • recency → when was the last time you used it

    • if used recently → probably won’t have trouble

  • age: older you get, the more difficult it becomes

Harris: judging assertions & implications

• bc when things are implied → we tend to think they are true

• assertions vs. implications ads → ppl will infer & willl answer true

• don’t remember verbatim → remember fist → make pragmatic impications

  • remember things not actually said