Exam 12: Deductive Reasoning and Decision Making

You decide that a bearded professor wearing a rumpled sports coat is a member of the art faculty, rather than the business school faculty (which actually has more members) because he looks like an artist. What judgment error have you committed?

When we make judgments based on the ease with which examples come to mind, we are using

An important difference between reasoning and decision making is that

People who often watch soap operas are likely to believe that amnesia, extramarital affairs, and mysterious disappearances occur more often than they actually occur in real life. A likely explanation for this finding is that

On the classic selection task in conditional reasoning, people work on the problem, "If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side." Research on variations of this task indicates that

Research on the belief-bias effect shows that

Here is a reasoning problem: "Some vegetables have seeds. Some things that have seeds are fruits. Therefore, some vegetables are fruits." What kind of reasoning does this represent?

A coin has been tossed six times, and has landed on "heads" five out of the six times. Haley comments that the coin must not be a fair coin, but Zhanna says that this conclusion is unwarranted. Haley has fallen victim to the

Suppose that Oksana is driving in a car to a friend's house. As she pulls into the friend's driveway, she sees that the odometer shows the number 2222.2 miles. She says to herself, "This number is weird…something really unusual is going to happen today when I am with my friend." This reaction would be an example of

Julio has been told, "If your name appears on the list outside Dr. Forest's office, you'll be in the psychology honors class next semester." Julio's name does indeed appear on the list. Julio concludes that he will be in the psychology honors class next semester. Julio is using

A physician is trying to convince a man that he must give up smoking. The man initially believes that the probability of lung cancer is increased by only 10% if he smokes. Why are decision-making heuristics relevant to this situation?

Suppose that Joseph Brown is a U.S. diplomat who works in Country X, and he is trying to assess whether Country X poses a threat to the United States. The diplomat gathers evidence that Country X poses a threat, but he does not try to gather evidence that Country X does not pose a threat. This error is called

If a researcher wants to conduct a study on the framing effect, which of the following would be the most likely topic for the study?

Why is the concept of base rate important in decisions that involve the representativeness heuristic?

What is one of the difficulties with the availability heuristic?

Which of the following students provides the most accurate perspective on the availability heuristic?

Barnett believes that "most people" share his political views. However, Barnett is basing his judgment on the views of his close friends, with whom he discusses politics most frequently, and with whom he shares core values and attitudes. Barnett is relying on the _____ heuristic.

Theme 2 argues that people are usually fairly accurate on cognitive tasks. How does this theme apply to deductive reasoning tasks?

Researchers such as Gerd Gigerenzer argue that people create a wide variety of heuristics that generally help them make adaptive decisions in the real world-a point of view referred to as

We often tend to see psychological patterns in the pictures that people draw. For example, we might think that suspicious people would tend to draw exaggerated eyes. What error in judgment does this represent?