COGS 170 Exam 1 Questions with Correct Answers

COGS 170 Exam 1 Questions with Correct Answers What is JDM? - ANSWER judgement and decision making -the study of intuitive statistics -the study of human decision making behavior, formal decision models, and the differences between the two Normative models of JDM -what are they -the goals -where do they originate - ANSWER -they are mathematical models that allow us to evaluate a judgement -goal-compare and improve judgements to standards that allow evaluations -originate from probability theory, utility theory, and statistics descriptive models - ANSWER psychological theories that try to explain how people make judgements and decisions -determine whether biases exist, we can use descriptive theories to explain them -model the process of making the decision prescriptive models - ANSWER -designs for improvement and help us to eliminate biases -mathematical tools to formally analyze decisions -compromise between normative and descriptive models ideal plan of JDM - ANSWER 1. apply nromative models of judgement and decision 2. look for possible biases 3. use the tools of psychology to understand the nature of biases (descriptive models) 4. develop approaches to improve them (prescriptive models) 5 main categories of normative models - ANSWER 1. quantitative judgementcan usually quantify departures from the right answer 2. judgements of probability-applied to a group of judgements of unique events and use formula to score 3. probabilities of related unique events-can assess their agreement with each other (has to add up to 1) 4. decisions- assess their consistency with the basic principles of decision making, such as dominance 5. set of decisions-assesss the coherency of a set of decisions using a mathematical model to define coherence, expected (EUT) expected utility theory (EUT) - ANSWER -analysis of acts, states of the world, outcomes, and utility derived from the outcome -there is a utility for each individual for each outcome and probabilities for the states -expected utility = determined from the probabilities of the states and the utilities of the outcomes Cognitive heuristics - ANSWER cognitive shortcuts -help individuals make decisions with less effort and information heuristics -what are they -why do we need them - ANSWER need them due to bounded rationality, we need shortcuts, so we use heuristics bounded rationality - ANSWER humans do not have enough brain capacity to know and retain all of the relevant information necessary to make fully-informed decisions, we have information costs and limited memory model of heuristics - ANSWER 1. process rule 2. capacities the rule exploits 3. kinds of problems the heuristic can be used to solve recognition heuristics - ANSWER fast and frugal heuristics- you recognize something but not the other you infer that the one you recognize is of higher value heuristics based on reason - ANSWER when recognition is not usable, we can search for reasons or cues -do-what-the-majority-does heuristic search heuristics - ANSWER -taking the best-search through cues in order of their validity -tallying- search through cues in random order, predict that the object with the higher number of positive cues has the higher value on criterion Which heuristics do I use? - ANSWER -almost never consciously decide which one to use -unconsciously tend to adapt heuristics to changing environments, provided there is feedback -can also learn by evolutionary and cultural learning robustness - ANSWER -ability to make predictions about the future or new events -good heuristics need to be robust Gaze heuristics - ANSWER 1. fixate on the ball 2. start running 3. heuristic: adjust the running speed so that the angle of their gaze remains constant -fast and frugal fast and frugal tree - ANSWER -more accurate than physicians' decisions -higher sensitivity and lower false positive rate why do we use heuristics? - ANSWER -predictive accuracy is high if can exploit the structure of the environment and because simplicity promotes robustness Heuristics and biases - ANSWER goal is to study intuitions about uncertainty and the extent to which they were compatible with normative probability calculations what is a bias? - ANSWER -deviations from a norm -slant in one way or the other -can be systematic deviance from normative models, suboptimal judgements, errors bias: cause vs effect - ANSWER originally thought of as effects, which were explained by heuristics -now they are used as explanations where do biases come from? - ANSWER a possible consequence of using heuristics advantages and disadvantages of heuristics - ANSWER + less effort, lower cost, faster, short cuts- less info needed to make decisions just as good with all info - possibly lead us down the wrong path predictions and probability judgement - ANSWER -represenativeness: probabilities a re evaluated by the degree to which A is representative of B-- degree to which A resembles B, can lead to many types of errors, insensitive to prior probability of outcomes and sample size -availability: assessing the frequency of a class of events or probability of an event by the ease at which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind, easy to recall if event is frequent and highly probable that will happen again -anchoring and adjustment:people make estimates by starting from an initial value (anchoring) + adjust it to get their final answer (adjustment), initial starting point could b