3.6 Biases in Thinking and Decision Making

Define Decision-making

A cognitive process of selecting a course of action from a set of available options

Define Thinking

A cognitive process of generating and manipulating mental representations to make sense of information, solve problems, and make decisions.

Thinking influenced by what?

Prior knowledge, motivation, emotion, and social context

How can thinking occur

Conscious or unconscious, deliberate or automatic

Models to represent processes of thinking

Simplified representation or abstraction of a complex system or phenomenon, which allows individuals to understand, predict, and manipulate behaviours

Two different types of models

Normative and Descriptive

Normative Models

Refer to decision-making models that describe the ideal or optimal way to make decisions, based on a set of logical principles or criteria.

Descriptive Models

Theoretical frameworks - aim to depict and understand how individuals actually make decisions

instead of prescribing how they should make decisions

Normative models are unrealistic because

Due to:

Limited computational capacity

Influence of emotion on thinking

Heuristics

Instead of normative - use shortcuts

Heuristics - Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that people use to simplify complex decision-making processes

What do heuristics lead to

Heuristics = cognitive biases

Who proposed system one and system two thinking

Daniel Kahneman 2003

System 1

Fast, instinctive

Uses mental shortcuts and heuristics to quickly make judgements

Survival

Multiple tasks simultaneously

Prone to cog bias

System 2

Slower, deliberate, conscious

Uses logical reasoning and analytical thinking to make judgements

Used for complex problem-solving

Essential for decisions from sustained attention

Bias

System 1 bases decisions on heuristics

Heuristics can result in patterns of thinking and decision-making that are consistent, but inaccurate, usually described as cognitive biases

Anchoring Bias

tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions.

During decision-making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgements

Anchoring Bias 2

Anchoring bias can be an issue when it occurs in a formal setting such as a court room

Englich and Mussweiler Year

2001

Englich and Mussweiler Aim

To investigate if the recommended sentence proposed by a prosecutor would unduly influence a judge’s decision

Method

True Laboratory

Design

Independent Measures

Sampling Strategy

Purposive

IV

Whether the recommended sentence was a high or low anchor

DV

Recommended Sentence for the guilty defendant

Procedure: Pilot Study

24 senior law students

Given case study

Asked to recommend a sentence

Average Recommendation: 17.21 months

Used to determine anchors

Procedure: Experimental Study

19 young trial judges (15m and 4f)

avg age: 29.37

avg experience: 9.34 months

Ppts given alleged rape case.

Prosecutor in one condition demanded a sentence of 2 months vs 34 months

Given: Case material & copies of the penal code

Given questionnaire

• Sentence too low, adequate, too high

• Sentence you recommend?

• How certain are you about your sentence decision? 1-9

• How realistic do you think this case is? 1-9

Findings

Pilot group: certainty 7.17 sd; 1.3

Low anchor: sentence was 18.78 months, with standard deviation of 9.11

High anchor: 28.7 months with sd of 6.53

Which study should be used with Englich and Mussweiler In a thinking and decision making ERQ

Tversky and Kahneman

Tversky and Kahneman Year

1974

Aim

To investigate how people make judgement under conditions of uncertainty

Method

True Lab Experiment

Design

independent Measures

Sampling Strategy

Convenience

IV

Whether sequence began with high or low anchor

DV

Estimated product of the Mathematical Problem

Procedure

Participants in “ascending” condition were asked to quickly estimate the value of 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 in five seconds

Those in “descending” condition were asked to quickly estimate the value of 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1

Since we read left to right, the researcher assumed that group 1 would use 1 as an anchor and predict a lower value than the group that started with 8 as the anchor

The expectation was that the first number seen would bias the estimate of the value by the participant

Findings

Median for the ascending group was 512

Median for the descending group was 2250

Actual value: 40320