Exam 12: Deductive Reasoning and Decision Making

Suppose that a friend is wondering what ever happened to a classmate named Bob who attended your high school and was on the wrestling team. You say that Bob is now a banker. Your friend says, "Well, Bob is likely to be a banker who is still interested in sports, rather than just a plain banker." Your friend has just demonstrated

Here is a reasoning problem. "All writers are creative. Some actors are creative. Therefore, some actors are writers." This is an example of

Here is a reasoning problem: If Mary is a psychology major at your college then she must take statistics. Mary graduates from your college without taking statistics. Therefore, Mary is not a psychology major. What kind of problem is this?

Research on the conjunction fallacy shows that

Your text discussed a classic study in which people were asked which cards they would need to turn over in order to find out whether a rule about the letters and numbers on the cards was true or false. What did the study show?

The decision theorists who favor the ecological-rationality perspective are most likely to argue that

An important difference between reasoning and decision making is that in reasoning,

Suppose that you are given several pieces of information, and you must infer whether the logical consequence of that information is correct. The task you are performing is called

Which of the following students provides the most accurate summary of Type 1 and Type 2 processing, in connection with reasoning and decision making?

Suppose that Kaitlin has a satisficing decision-making style, and she is shopping for a winter jacket. She would be most likely to

According to the discussion of sample size and representativeness,

Heuristics are relevant when we try to answer a reasoning problem because

A professor knows that if it is raining outside, the window of her office will be wet. She looks at her window and notices that it is wet. She, therefore, concludes that it must be raining outside. Which kind of reasoning is she using?

According to the framing effect,

Yesterday, Dr. Ling announced to his biopsychology class, "If we are going to have a review session on Tuesday, everyone in the class will receive an e-mail message on Friday." Elspeth is enrolled in the class, and she did not receive a message on Friday. Based on these premises, she concludes that the class will not have a review session on Tuesday. She is using the kind of reasoning known as

Which of the following heuristics is most likely to produce a correct decision?

Cynthia has developed an informal hypothesis: "If a student is a psychology major, then that student favors gun control." She questions 20 psychology majors and all 20 do favor gun control. However, she does not pursue additional information. Specifically, she does not seek out people who oppose gun control to determine whether they are psychology majors. From the perspective of deductive reasoning, Cynthia has

Suppose that you are assigning eight college students to two committees. By chance, one committee has four students from the social sciences, and the other has four students from the humanities. If people protest that this arrangement does not seem to be random, they are following

Chapter 12, on reasoning and decision making, emphasizes that we frequently endorse our current hypotheses and thoughts, rather than questioning them. Which of the following topics is least likely to show an overemphasis on our current hypotheses?

Here is a reasoning problem: "If today is Tuesday then my cognition class meets this morning. Today is not Tuesday. Therefore, my cognition class does not meet this morning." What kind of reasoning does this represent?