BCS172 Exam #2 - Middle Childhood: Judgement

Implicit vs. explicit judgment

- Children can process duration implicitly from a young age, but their ability to explicitly judge and estimate duration improves with age

- Direct comparisons vs. comparisons with multiple variables

Performance in explicit judgment reaches adult-like performance by ____ years old for short durations and ____ years for long durations

1) 6

2) 8-9

Cognitive abilities and judgement

Cognitive sophistication (attention, working memory, reasoning) plays a critical role in the development of judgement

Judgement

- Process through which people draw conclusions from evidence they encounter

- Exercise it in increasingly high-stakes situations as we age

How do people assess the relative importance of issues?

- By the ease with which they are retrieved from memory

- Largely determined by amount of media coverage

Attribute substitution

- When individuals must make judgments that are complex but instead substitute a simpler solution or apply heuristic

- "Intuitive"

- Subject to biases -- based on what we've been exposed to

When is attribute substitution most likely?

- Don't have direct access to relevant info (e.g., frequency of an event)

- Judgement is "computationally complex" --> use what's available

- Marketers, politicians, lobbyists, etc. take advantage

Examples of attribute substitution

- Valuing insurance ("death of any kind" vs. "death by terrorist")

- Stereotypes

- Morality (defer to leader or strong emotion)

- Beauty (attractive faces judged as more familiar)

Heuristic

Efficient strategies that usually lead to the correct answer

Availability heuristic

Judgement strategy that relies on how easily examples come to mind

Availability heuristic: examples

- What are your chances of winning the lottery?

- Are you more likely to die of cancer or heart disease?

- In the English language, are there more words that begin with "R" or have "R" in the 3rd position?

Why can the availability heuristic fail?

- People regularly overestimate frequency of rare events

- Rare events likely to be well-recorded in memory --> more available than common events

Representativeness heuristic

- Making a decision by comparing present circumstance to a representative mental prototype

- Requires assumption of homogeneity (consider cultural humility)

- Likelihood of category membership judged by resemblance

The representativeness heuristic is another example of...

Attribute substitution

Representativeness heuristic: Gambler's fallacy

Q: If a coin is tossed "heads" 6 times, what are the odds of getting tails on the 7th?

- Every toss has a 50/50 chance no matter what, but we may judge heads as more likely in this scenario

Confirmation bias

Greater sensitivity to confirming evidence and a tendency to neglect disconfirming evidence

Forms of confirmation bias

- When assessing a hypothesis, more likely to seek out info that confirms it

- People fail to use disconfirming evidence to adjust their beliefs

Belief perseverance

Tendency to continue endorsing a belief, even when disconfirming evidence is undeniable

Belief perseverance: example

When told that feedback from others was false, participants' self-ratings continue to be influenced by that information

Anchoring heuristic

a mental shortcut that involves basing judgements on an initial piece of information ("anchor")

Framing effect

- Decisions are influenced by how choices/info are presented

- Ex: 80% fat-free vs. 20% fat

Affect heuristic

- Making emotionally-driven decisions rather than logically evaluating risks and benefits

- Ex: not investing in a stock b/c it's "too risky" despite good data

Emotions and decisions

- Decisions may be powerfully influenced by emotions

- We often rely on somatic markers (e.g., "gut feeling) -- listen to how our body responds to stressors/risks

The _____ cortex is essential for evaluation of somatic markers, as it activates in moments of stress and/or high-risk. Damage to this area leads to _____

1) Orbitofrontal

2) Risk-taking

How do we make better decisions?

- Educate oneself on objective measures of probability

- Beware of threats to valid judgement (e.g., confirmation bias)

- Consider how emotions exert influence over judgement