Psychological Science 7th edition
CH8: Thinking, Decisions, Intelligence and Language
Language can shape our thoughts…..
8.1: Thinking involves 2 types of mental representations
- Knowledge about the world is stored in the brain in representations
- Thinking is the mental manipulation of these representations.
So, we use representations to understand objectives we encounter in our environments
Examples of representation use:
- Road-map represents the street
- Menu represents food options
- (Language is a representation too, just way more abstract)
Cognitive psychologists face the challenge of understanding the nature of everyday mental representations.
In thinking we use 2 basic types of mental representations: Analogical & Symbolic.
- An analogy compares two things that are similar in some way.
- A is to B, what C is to D
- Maps are analogical representations that correspond to geographical layouts.
- Movement of clocks represent the passage of time
- Symbolic representations are abstract (words, numbers or ideas). No relationships to physical
qualities of objects in the world. For example:
- The word ‘violin’ stands for musical instrument. The letters of ‘violin’ have got nothing to do
with what a violin looks or sounds like. -> it bears no systematic relationship to the object
it names. You can not ‘see’ any part of a violin in the word violin.
- Funny, I thought of this myself while summarizing, bed kind of shows the shape of a bed.
Q: When an architect produces a blueprint for a new house, is this representation analogical or symbolic?
- A: Blueprint is an analogical representation because it is a two-dimensional image that physically
and spatially corresponds to a three-dimensional house.
Glossary 8.1:
- Cognition: Mental activity that includes thinking and the understandings that result from thinking.
- Thinking: Mental manipulation of representations of knowledge about the world.
- Analogical representations: Mental representations that have some of the physical characters of
what they represent
- Symbolic representations: Abstract mental representations that don’t correspond to physical
features of objects or ideas.
8.2: Concepts are symbolic representations
Thinking reflects a person’s general knowledge of the world. When you’re shown a drawing of a small, yellow,
dimpled object, and asked to identify it. Your brain forms a mental image (analogical) of a lemon and
provides you with the word lemon (symbolic).
- However, this info is incomplete. Picturing a lemon and knowing its name, does not tell you how to
use a lemon. Knowing which parts are edible will cause you to know what to do with it.
,How do we use knowledge about objects efficiently?
- Categorization: Grouping based on shared properties. This reduces the amount of memory required,
and is therefore an efficient way of thinking. For example a category such as ‘musical instruments’.
- Concept: Category, or class, of related items. Consists of mental representations of items.
- By organizing mental representations, we don’t have to remember every detail of items of concepts.
2 leading ways of people forming concepts:
- Prototype model (Eleanor Rosch):
- Based on a ‘best example’: When you think about a category, you tend to look for a best example, or
prototype, for that category. Once you have the prototype, you categorize new objects based on how
similar they are to the prototype.
- Exemplar model (Medin & Schaffer):
- Proposes that any concept has no single best representation. Instead, all the examples form the
concept. → Your representation of dogs is formed by all the dogs you have encountered.
Patterns of brain activity can be used to identify aspects of conscious experience, such as whether people
are looking at faces of objects. Imaging studies showed that different categories of objects, such as animals
or tools, are represented in different regions of the brain based on our perception of those objects.
- Animals → activates visual areas (just thinking about the visual part)
- Tools → movement + visual areas (visual + what to do with it)
- We categorize some objects in multiple ways. Difference in brain activity with ‘scary’ animals and
‘cute’ animals.
Q: You are learning how to identify edible mushrooms. To make your judgment, you compare all fungi in the
environment to the portabella mushrooms in the grocery store. Are you using a prototype or an exemplar
model of concept development?
- A: Prototype model, because you categorize fungi as edible based on a comparison to your ‘best
example’ of portabella mushrooms.
8.3: Schemas organize useful information about environments
Prototype and exemplar explain how we classify and represent objects. But our knowledge extends beyond a
list of facts we know about specific items we encounter. A different class of knowledge enables us to interact
with the complex realities of our environments. Knowledge on how to behave in each setting relies on
schemas. → Help us perceive, organize, understand and process information.
- Ex. It’s normal in the casino to squeeze in between people who are sat. In a restaurant it would be
weird if a stranger came and sit right next to you
Common schemas help us understand the sequence of events in certain situations. Schank & Abelson
referred to these schemas about sequences as scripts. → schemas that direct behavior over time within a
situation. Going to the movies has pretty clear steps: buy ticket - buy snack - sit down - watch movie
Sometimes, schemas, like prototypes, have unintended consequences like reinforcing sexist or racist beliefs.
- Gender roles represent a type of schema that operates at the unconscious level. By age 6, girls are
already less likely to believe members of their gender are ‘really, really smart’, and begin avoiding
activities that are associated with being that smart.
,Stereotypes: Cognitive schemas that allow for easy, fast processing of information about people based on
their membership in certain groups.
Schemas and scripts persist, despite their problematic potential. Their adaptive value is that these shortcuts
minimize the amount of attention required to navigate familiar environments. They also enable us to
recognize and avoid unusual or dangerous situations.
Q: At fast-food restaurants we pay when we order, but at fine-dining restaurants we pay after eating. How do
schemas help us behave appropriately in each place?
- A: One type of schema is a script, which provides info about the sequence of events within a specific
situation.
We make decisions throughout each day, like what to eat for breakfast, without even noticing. Decisions like
what college to attend, and whether to buy a horse, are more consequential and require more reflection.
8.4 Decision making often involves heuristics
Many decisions are made under some degree of risk → uncertainty about the outcome. We pretend to be
rational during decision making, but the fear of flying, or going to the movies instead of studying, are oftenly
not rational.
For most of psychology’s history, the prevailing theory was that people are rational. This theory highlighted
how people should make decisions. Kahneman and Tversky (1970) shattered many theories about focusing
on what people should do. They focused more on what people actually do. They showed that people are no
calm or rational thinkers, instead, we’re biased, use irrelevant criteria, and influenced by emotions.
Kahneman and Tversky identified common mental shortcuts (heuristics). Heuristic thinking:
- Often occurs unconsciously.
- Requires minimal cognitive resources, which is helpful for limited capacity of the conscious mind.
- Allows us to focus on other / more things
- Can be adaptive, because it sometimes is better to make a quick decision, rather than weigh all
evidence before deciding.
- Can result in biases, which may lead to errors or faulty decisions.
Confirmation bias: focusing only on info that supported their views.
Hindsight bias: When events turn out contrary to their predictions, there are ‘after the fact’ explanations
Relative comparisons (anchoring and framing)
- Comparisons are used to judge value. You’ll feel better about a 7 when the average is a 6 than an 8
- In making relative comparisons, people are influenced by anchoring and framing.
Anchor: reference point in decision making. Anchoring occurs when people rely on the first piece of info they
encounter, while making a decision. After making an initial judgment based on an anchor, people compare
subsequent info and just adjust away from the anchor until the info feels reasonable.
- You would rather have 70% of passing, instead of 30% of failing.
- People adjust impressions based on the first few attributes listed.
, Framing: choosing by emphasizing the potential loss or potential gain can lead to different decisions.
- When people make choices, they may weigh losses and gains differently. Generally more concerned
with costs than with benefits → loss aversion.
Availability heuristic: general tendency to make a decision based on the answer that comes most easily to
mind. Information that is readily available biases decision making.
Representativeness heuristic: tendency to place a person or an object in a category if the person or object is
similar to our prototype for that category. Used by deciding based on info telling us what we already believe.
- Can lead to faulty thinking if we fail to take other info in account. Base rate is important, refers to
how frequently an event occurs.
Q: Why might someone be more inclined to buy an item with an expensive regular price that is on sale, than a
similar item at a reasonable and equivalent regular price.
- A: The expensive price serves as an anchor, so the sale price may seem more attractive.
8.5: Emotions influence decision making
Integral emotions inform choice value, emotions influence decision making in multiple ways:
- Providing an internal signal about the value of different choice options. Thinking about how an
activity will make you feel, provides a signal about relative value of the two choice options. This
way, the emotion is integral to the decision.
Affective forecasting: The tendency for people to overestimate how events will make them feel in the future.
Unfortunately we suck at affective forecasting - predicting how we will feel about things in the future.
- People have an amazing capacity for manufacturing happiness. They however are generally unaware
that they can find positive outcomes from tragic events.
Affective states incidentally bias decisions → the affect or emotion is incidental to the choice. Ex. You rudely
snap at someone, because you were angry about something else.
- Endowment effect: tendency to value things we own more than we would pay to buy them.
- People in a neutral / happy mood would show a typical endowment effect.
- People in a sad mood showed a reversal of the endowment effect.
Q: People sell stocks when the stock market goes down even though many finance experts advise investors
to retain or increase their holdings at such times. How does loss aversion explain this behavior?
- A: People may weigh potential losses more than gains, so they care more about the stock market
going down, than with making money if the stock market goes up.
8.6: Big data, mood, and decisions
Governments use BD on decisions to design policies that help meet the goals of their societies. Increasingly,
psychological scientists are also turning to BD to characterize how humans make decisions.
Given the challenges of studying emotions in laboratory settings, the relation between decision making and
emotion is a topic that scientists have started to investigate using publicly available big data sets.
