9/29 higher ordere cognition

Higher Order Cognition

Thinking processes involved in concepts, reasoning, decision making, and judgment

Choice Blindness

Failure to notice a mismatch between a choice and the outcome presented as that choice

Choice Blindness Finding

People may justify a choice they did not actually make

Cognitive Economy

Organizing information into categories to reduce distinctions while maintaining useful information

Superordinate Category

Broad, general level of categorization

Basic Category

Common middle level of categorization that balances informativeness and cognitive economy

Subordinate Category

Narrow and highly specific level of categorization

Confirmation Bias

Tendency to seek or produce evidence that confirms a hypothesis rather than disconfirms it

Hypothesis Testing

Process of evaluating evidence to determine whether a proposed explanation is supported

Wason Card Task

Task demonstrating difficulty searching for evidence that could falsify a rule

Falsification

Testing a hypothesis by looking for evidence that could show it is wrong

Wason Social Version

People perform better when the reasoning problem involves detecting violations of social rules

Cheater Detection Explanation

People may be especially good at reasoning about social rules involving possible cheaters

Bounded Rationality

Limits in attention, memory, and processing prevent perfectly rational decision making

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts used to make judgments and decisions with limited cognitive resources

Prospect Theory

Theory that decisions depend on perceived gains and losses, probabilities, and reference points

Value Function

Represents the subjective value people assign to gains and losses

Diminishing Sensitivity

Additional gains or losses have progressively smaller psychological effects

Loss Aversion

Losses generally have a greater psychological impact than equivalent gains

Risk Aversion for Gains

Tendency to prefer a certain gain over a risky option with similar expected value

Risk Seeking for Losses

Tendency to prefer a risky option when choices are framed as losses

Framing Effect

Different presentations of equivalent choices can produce different decisions

Gain Frame

Describes an outcome in terms of what will be gained or saved

Loss Frame

Describes an outcome in terms of what will be lost

Risk Function

Represents how people psychologically weight probabilities rather than treating them objectively

Small Probability Weighting

People tend to overweight small probabilities

Large Probability Weighting

People tend to underweight large probabilities

Certainty Effect

Certain outcomes receive special psychological weight compared with merely probable outcomes

Reference Point

Baseline used to determine whether an outcome is experienced as a gain or loss

Availability

Judgment influenced by how easily relevant information comes to mind

Fluency

Judgment influenced by how easily information is processed

Representativeness

Judging something based on how closely it resembles a typical example or category

Anchoring

Judgment is pulled toward an initial value or piece of information

Affect Heuristic

Judgments and decisions are influenced by emotional reactions

Higher Order Cognition Main Idea

Human reasoning is constrained by cognitive limits and therefore shows systematic biases

Prospect Theory Main Pattern

Gains promote risk aversion while losses promote risk seeking

Judgment Main Idea

Bounded rationality leads people to use shortcuts such as availability, fluency, representativeness, anchoring, and affect