Chapter 8

Chapter 8

8.4 Of Two Minds: Forming Judgements and Making Decisions          

• We use our thinking capabilities to make hundred of judgements or conclusions drawn from evidence we have at hand

  • Judgements often lead to decisions, or choices that affect our behavior

• Our thinking capabilities are limited

  • We have limited attention, memory capabilities, and processing power 

• We have limited information and time 

  • These limitations influence our willingness to make a decision and constrain how logical and reasonable our decisions can be 

• Bounded Rationality: The idea that rational decision making is constrained by limitations in people's cognitive abilities, available information, and time.

• Individuals often turn to others and to technology to work around their limitations 

• They also use psychological tricks to make judgements and decisions quickly and with less effort 

• Dual-processing theories: The proposal that people have two types of thinking that they can use to make judgments and decisions

  • Controlled System: One that is slower, more effortful, and leads to more thoughtful and rational outcomes

  • Automatic System: One that is fast, fairly effortless, and leads to decent outcomes most of the time.

8.5 Intuitive Thinking With Heuristics           

• Heuristics: a powerful set of mental tools that people use to navigate everyday judgements and decisions

  • Mental shortcuts that are quick, effortless, intuitive, and automatic 

• Heuristics tend to operate outside of conscious awareness

• Heuristics lead to good judgments and decisions 

• Representativeness Heuristic: a shortcut for judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent or be prototypical of some category 

• Availability Heuristic: A strategy for deciding how common or probably something is based on how easily it comes to mind 

  • Can often spark irrational fears 

8.6 “Going With Our Gut”: How Emotion Guides Reason           

• Far from being the enemy of reason, the emotional responses we experience provide another way for people to make judgements and decisions efficiently and effectively 

• Affective reaction: key ingredients in our emotions, moods, and attitude (but more simple) 

  • Basic feeling of “good-for-me” (positive affect) or “bad-for-me” (negative affect) 

  • Are quick and automatic that they guide people’s decision more often than reason 

• Affect heuristic: a tendency to use the positive or negative affect we associate with various objects and events in the world to make judgements and decisions 

  • • Helps to associated affective reactions of good and bad with possible consequences of their actions 

• One consequence of being unable to use affect to guide decisions is making choices that are not in one’s best interest 

• Moral judgment: or judgements made about the rightness or wrongness of a particular behavior 

8.7 Sticky Beliefs That Bias Thinking           

• Confirmation bias: the tendency to look for and weigh evidence that confirms pre existing beliefs more strongly than evidence that confirms preexisting beliefs more strongly than evidence that is inconsistent with those beliefs 

  • Makes it difficult for people to change their beliefs, even when faced with discomforting evidence 

  • A problem in frustrating conflicts, serious problems, and scientific research  

    • Example for frustrating conflicts: roommate issues

    • Example for serious problems: finding evidence in criminal investigation that either defy or support the victim 

    • Example for scientific research: scientists finding research to support their hypothesis and discount findings that act as a flaw to their research 

• Belief Perseverance: the tendency people feel when resisting to change their beliefs, even when faced with convincing evidence

• Widespread of social media can amplify the effects of confirmation bias 

• How to avoid confirmation bias 

  • Give people a concrete strategy to reduce bias by encouraging them to actively imagine and consider the opposite point of view

8.8 Searching for Answers: The Power of Framing to Influence Thinking           

• Framing: the way problems are presented

  • Can change decisions by shifting the decision makers’ reference point 

• People make decisions that minimize or avoid losses

  • Loss aversion

    • Pushes individuals to cling tightly to what they have, for fear of losing it 

• What counts as a gain or loss depends on the reference point 

• The framing of an issue can change reference points and affect decisions in numerous ways 

8.9 More Confident Than Correct           

• Overconfidence bias: a tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s knowledge and judgements 

• Hindsight Bias: overestimate the likelihood that they would have predicted some outcome 

  • Know it all 

  • Poses a special problem in psychology: it can lead students to believe that psychology is simply common sense 

• Confidence causes individuals to be overly confident 

  • They rely on imperfect information

• People might be more overconfident because it makes them more successful 

Reasoning (October 16)         

• Biases in Reasoning 

  • Biases 

    • Confirmation bias

      • We tend to seek confirmation, not disconfirmation, of theories or hypotheses

    • Availability bias (remember vividness effect!) 

      • We tend to think more recent/salient/recollectable events are more likely to occur than less recent/salient/recolelctable ones

    • Predictable world bias 

      • We tend to see patterns where there are none 

  • Other Heuristics 

    • Representativeness heuristics 

      • Using prototypical features over objective probabilities for decisions 

    • Affect Heuristic 

      • Using feelings for decisions