Chapter 12: Deductive Reasoning and Decision Making

Deductive Reasoning

It begins with some specific premises that are generally true, and you need to judge whether those premises allow you to draw a particular conclusion, based on the principles of logic.

Conditional Reasoning Task

It is one of the most common kinds of deductive reasoning tasks; if-then structure.

Syllogism

It consists of two statements assumed to be true, plus a conclusion.

Propositional Calculus

It is a system for categorizing four kinds of reasoning used in analyzing propositions or statements.

Affirming the Antecedent

“If” part is true; leads to a valid or correct conclusion.

Affirming the Consequent

“then” is true; leads to an invalid conclusion

Denying the Antecedent

“If” is false; leads to an invalid conclusion

Denying the Consequent

“then” is false; leads to a correct conclusion

Belief-Bias Effect

It occurs when people make judgments based on prior beliefs and general knowledge, rather than on the rules of logic.

Confirmation Bias

Occurs when people would try to confirm or support a hypothesis than try to disprove it.

Standford Wason Selection Task

People who are given a choice would rather know what something is than what it is not.

Decision Making

It involves assessing the information first and then choosing among two or more alternatives.

Deductive Reasoning

It uses the established rules of propositional Calculus to draw clear-cut conclusions.

Heuristics

These are general strategies that typically produce a correct solution.

Small-sample fallacy

It assumes that a small sample will be representative of the population from which it is selected.

Base rate

How often the item occurs in the population.

Conjunction Rule

It is the probability of the conjunction of two events that cannot be larger than the probability of either of its constituent events.

Conjunction Fallacy

Judge the probability of the conjunction of two events to be greater than the probability of either constituent events.

Availability Heuristic

It estimate the frequency of probability in terms of how easy it is to think of relevant examples of something.

Recognition Heuristic

It operates when you must compare the relative frequency of two categories.

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristics

People rely too heavily on the anchor, such that their adjustments are too small.

Confidence Interval

It is the range within which we expect a number to fall a certain percentage of the time.

Ecological Rationality

It describe how people create wide variety of heuristics to help themselves make useful, adaptive decisions in the real world.

Default Heuristic

If there is a standard option which happens when people do nothing then people will choose it.

Framing Effect

It is the outcome of your decision that can be influenced by the background context of your choice and the way in which a question is worded or framed.

Prospect Theory

It is the people’s tendencies to think that possible gains are different from possible losses.

Overconfidence

These are confidence judgments which are higher than they should be based on actual performance on the task.

Illusory Correlation

People are confident that two variable are related, when in fact the relationship is weak or nonexistent.

Anchoring Adjustment

People are so confident in their estimation abilities that they supply very narrow confidence intervals for these estimates.

Planning Fallacy

People typically underestimate the amount of time or money required to complete a project.

My-side Bias

Overconfidence that your own view is correct Ina confrontational situation.

Hindsight Bias

Occurs when an event has happened and we say the event has been inevitable.

Hindsight

Judgments about events that already happened in the past.

Maximizers

Have a maximizing decision-making style; tends to examine as many options as possible.

Satisficers

Have a satisficing decision-making style; tends to settle for something that is satisfactory.