Reason and Intuition Exam 1

Unconscious vs conscious mind

Autopilot vs pilot, system 1 vs. system 2, elephant vs rider

Descartes’ Dualism

Mind and body are two different things. Mind is thinking and body is physical. “I think therefore I am” important because proves something is thinking and your body can’t think therefore your mind and body are separate.

Biological reasons for unconscious processing

Breathing, heartbeat, sweating, digestion, etc. Too much energy to constantly focus on these. Efficient routines for perception, attention, memory, and action. Needed for back then when there is a predator you can’t think if you need to run or think if it’s dangerous you just need to survive.

Why have consciousness at all?

To have behavioral flexibility: The ability to be aware of ourselves and our environment and to think about different responses. Crucial for surviving in a changing world.

Baars (1998) reason for consciousness

Central hub to distribute information throughout the brain, control voluntary actions,

Freud background

Trained as medical doctor, worked on aphasia (brain injury), assumed that reason drove human behavior, psychoanalysis

Freud’s topographical model

Mental gate blocking unconscious from getting out.

Freud’s Structural Model of the Mind

Id, ego, superego

Id: Unconscious

Fully unconscious. Basic instincts, desires, and drives (hunger, sex, and aggression). Operates on the pleasure principle: seeking immediate gratification.

Ego: Unconscious, preconscious, and conscious

Operates across all three levels of awareness. Rational part of the mind that balances the id’s impulses with reality. It follows the reality principle and mediates between the id and the superego.

Superego: Mostly Unconscious, but also Preconscious and Conscious

Contains our moral values and societal rules. Some aspects (like our internalized sense of guilt) are unconscious, while others (like our conscious moral reasoning) are accessible.

Ego employs defense mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are ways that the ego unconsciously tries to decrease internal conflict between superego, id, and reality

Avoidance: Primitive defense mechanism

Dismissing uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, staying away from people, places, or situations associated with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings

Denial: Primitive defense mechanism

Dismissing external reality and instead focusing on internal explanations or fallacies and thereby avoiding the uncomfortable reality of a situation

Repression: Primitive defense mechanism

Subconsciously blocking ideas or impulses that are undesirable

Displacement: Higher-level defense mechanism

Transferring one’s emotional burden or emotional reaction from one entity to another

Intellectualization: Higher-level defense mechanism

The development of patterns of excessive thinking or over-analyzing, which may increase the distance from one's emotions

Reaction Forming: Higher-level defense mechanism

Replacing one’s initial impulse toward a situation or idea with the opposite impulse

Freud and dreams: Revealing the Id (subconscious)

Dreams reveal id because the mental gate (the ego) is down. Ego is thought to not be active during sleep.

Projective tests to reveal unconscious information

Show you photo and ask what you see. Not very reliable. Low test-retest reliability. Some clinicians use as starting point/discussion

Scientific Theory

1. Account for existing facts

2. Make predictions about new facts

3. Tested in different ways (lines of evidence)

4. Can be falsified (can be proven wrong)

Freud’s Psychoanalysis

His theory of personality and a therapeutic approach focused on exploring the unconscious mind. It suggests that human behavior is driven by unconscious thoughts, desires, and conflicts, often rooted in childhood experiences.

Critiques of psychoanalysis

1. Based mostly on Freud’s anecdotes about patients

2. Hard to make predictions that can be falsified (childhood trauma leads to neurosis but if they’re not neurotic it’s because the trauma is being repressed)

3. No clear efficacy vs. other therapies

Strengths of psychoanalysis

Essentially, it served as a starting point

Sleep wake cycle and consciousness

“Lose” consciousness every night and “get it back” every morning

System 1 vs System 2 Image

Meant to minimize effort and maximize performance

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System 1 basic principle

We are aware of the products but not the process of cognition

WYSIATI: What you see is all there is

People make judgements and decisions based off only on the information they have and do not consider what they don’t know, System 1. Explains why people fall for biases, stereotypes, and misinformation.

Expectation vs perception block example

Large block and small block of equal weights. People applied more force to lift bigger box because they assumed it weighed more. Participants reported the smaller box to be heavier after lifting even though they weighed the same. B/c they applied more force to bigger box and didn’t expect the strain from smaller box, so they believed smaller to be heavier.

System 1 and hallucinations

False because not induced by sensory information from outside world. True because person has vivid experience of perceiving something.

Memory works as a contructive process

Think of it as a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it but so can other people

Misattribution: 7 sins of memory

Remember information correctly but assign it to the wrong source. Hear it from a friend but later believe you read it in an article. Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: presented list of words like bed, rest, dream, tired, and snooze and participants recalled hearing the word sleep even though it was not presented. Relates to availability bias.

Suggestibility: 7 sins of memory

External information distorts your memory. This often happens through leading questions or misinformation, like in eyewitness testimony. Ex. If someone asks, “Did the man in the red jacket steal the purse?”, you might remember a red jacket even if it wasn’t there.

Suggestibility and retroactive interference: 7 sins of memory

New information interferes with old memories, making it harder to recall the original. It’s related to suggestibility because misinformation introduced later can override your initial memory. Ex. You learn a new phone number and later struggle to recall your old one.

Bias: 7 sins of memory

Memory bias happens when our current beliefs, feelings, or knowledge influence how we remember the past.

Bias: Consistency bias: 7 sins of memory

This specific bias makes us believe that our past attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors were more consistent with our present views than they actually were. We rewrite our past to match our current self.

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Judgement involves

deciding on the likelihood of various events using incomplete information

Decision making

Involves selecting one option from several possibilities

Heuristics are

shortcuts to judgement and decision making

Hindsight bias

"knew-it-all-along" effect, is when people believe—after an event has happened—that they predicted it all along, even if they didn’t.

We see past events as more predictable than they actually were.

We forget our original uncertainty or misjudgments.

It can make us overconfident in our decision-making.

Happens because we want to make sense of the past

Peak end rule

we judge an experience based mostly on two key moments:

1. The Peak – The most intense (positive or negative) moment of the experience.

2. The End – How the experience concluded.

A long, painful procedure is recalled as less unpleasant if the pain lessens toward the end.

Fading Affect Bias (FAB)

Tendency for negative emotions associated with memories to fade faster than positive emotions over time. This means that as we recall past events, negative memories lose their emotional intensity faster than positive ones, helping us maintain a more positive outlook.

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Availability heuristic

The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind. It operates on the assumption that if something can be recalled, it must be important or more important than alternative solutions that are not as readily recalled

Anchoring effect

People latch onto information (anchor) and let it affect their decision even if it is completely irrelevant,

Anchoring and Adjustments

Only adjust a certain amount away from anchor

Representative heuristic

people judge the likelihood of an event based on how similar it is to an existing stereotype or prototype in their mind. Instead of considering actual probabilities, we rely on how well something "represents" what we expect.

Is bob (creative, plays cello, artistic) more likely to be in an orchestra or be a farmer? People assume orchestra but statistically it’s farmer

Conjunction Fallacy

Assuming that two conditions together are more probable than one alone

Assume Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement rather than one or the other when really it’s just one because of stats

Simulation heuristic

judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which you can imagine (or men-tally simulate) an event.

Getting second hurts more than third because you could imagine first

Missing train by 5 min is more frustrating than missing it by 45 even though in both cases nothing else is different

Base rate heuristic

people tend to ignore statistical information (base rates) in favor of specific, anecdotal, or representative information when making judgments.

Scenario:

Medical Diagnosis Mistakes

• A rare disease affects 1 in 10,000 people. A test for the disease is 99% accurate.

• If someone gets a positive result, many assume they definitely have the disease.

• However, because the disease is so rare, the actual probability of having it is still very low.

💡 Base Rate Neglect: People ignore that most positive test results will be false positives because they focus only on the accuracy of the test.

AIM heuristic: Affect as information

Imagine a child who lives with a cuddly collection of well-mannered dogs who comes across a strange dog. Also imagine a second child who was recently bitten severely by the neighbour’s cocker spaniel. The former child will asso- ciate dogs with pleasant feelings and will unconsciously judge the risk in saying hello to the new dog as low and the benefit as high. The latter child will associate dogs with fear and pain and will judge the risk in getting close to the strange dog as high and the benefit as low. Without thinking about it, the former will probably approach the dog in question, whilst the latter will not. Both children display the affect heuristic in action – an involuntary emotional response that influences decision-making.