Deck 13: Judgment, Decisions, and Reasoning

Question 1

Astrology is popular with many people because they perceive a close connection between astrological predictions and events in their lives. Explain factors that might lead to this perception even if a close connection does not, in fact, exist.

Answer 1

Astrology seeks information about the influence of planets, stars and other celestial bodies in our lives. Almost everyone in the universe make such predictions based on the past experiences. They even perceive close connection between the astrological predictions with their lives. But these predictions can be wrong as we can remember only less frequently occurring events in our memory that have close relationship with the astrological predictions.
Astrology can have illusory correlation between the movement of the celestial bodies in space and events happening in our lives. It means that the correlation appears to exist but in reality it would not be the case. The correlation may be weaker than our assumptions. People are fooling themselves by thinking that the movement of the celestial bodies influences the events in our lives, though they are actually not. People falsely believe in astrology by relating it with the events in their lives, how often it is occurring and matching and how much it resembles with them.
According to astrologers, the position of stars and planets directly influence the people and events happening on earth. Some of the factors that allow people to believe in astrology are given as follows:
i. Incorrect assumption that small samples are representative : Individuals do not realize that astrologers tell the future of a person only with limited information, such as their time of birth, latitude and longitude of the place of birth. Here, the sample's size on which the observations are made is very small.
ii. Judgments are being made on resemblances : People ignore the other information such as the genes influencing their life style, their education, environment they live in and diseases they have been affected with. All such information also affects a person's future and can predict the destiny of a person.
iii. Judging with the availability : Astrologers make the task of people easier by giving examples of the events occurring in life with the positions of celestial objects in space. But people fail to judge them with other information such as what lead their lives to become horrible and what they have done with their lives from birth. They only access the information which is given to them but do not try to find about it themselves. Thus, they are misjudging.
iv. Quality of evidence : Many a times astrologists mislead people by telling the causes of the disease are due to the celestial objects moving in space. But people should consider the quality of the evidence before making judgment. The disease can be genetic, maybe due to unhealthy diet, polluted environment and many other reasons. Only a medical expert can tell the causes of disease and not the astrologer. Conclusions made by the astrologer's information would be wrong and weak.

Question 2

Think about a decision you have made recently. It can be a minor one, such as deciding which restaurant to go to on Saturday evening, or a more important one, such as choosing an apartment or deciding which college to attend. Analyze this decision, taking into account the processes you went through to arrive at it and how you justified it in your mind as being a good decision.

Answer 2

Psychology defines 'decision- making' as a cognitive process, which results in the selection of a belief or a certain course of action among many other alternative possibilities. Every decision- making process results in the production of a final choice that has the ability to prompt action.
The decision that will be analyzed here is about taking biology as the subject for higher degree course. This decision is extremely important as it is a major life choice, which has the potential to decide a person's future life.
Making decisions involves making judgments about many different courses of action. A person arrives on a certain decision by calculating both the benefits and the costs associated with the decision.
While making decisions about choosing a specific subject for a higher degree course, it is extremely important to consider all the major risks and benefits associated with taking up that subject. One of the most important points for consideration is whether I like the subject or not. If I am not driven by the subject in consideration, it is likely that I will lose interest in the subject in the long run. As a result, my grades as well as my future will suffer.
Another important fact that was considered was the career opportunities that the said course has to offer. The third important point to consider is the reputation of the college from which I was deciding to pursue the course. The decision to study biology was good because I have a strong liking for the subject, and the fact that this subject is emerging as one of the subjects which has a myriad of career opportunities.

Question 3

Create deductive syllogisms and inductive arguments that apply to the decision you analyzed in the previous question.
previous question
Think about a decision you have made recently. It can be a minor one, such as deciding which restaurant to go to on Saturday evening, or a more important one, such as choosing an apartment or deciding which college to attend. Analyze this decision, taking into account the processes you went through to arrive at it and how you justified it in your mind as being a good decision.

Answer 3

Two specific types of reasoning can be identified namely, inductive and deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning includes certain statements that have a definite sequence. These statements are called syllogisms. A syllogism consists primarily of two statements that are known as premises , which are followed by conclusion, the third statement. A person can arrive at a definite conclusion by the process of deductive reasoning.
In the other type of reasoning, that is, inductive reasoning, a person arrives at probable conclusions based on evidences. Here, the conclusions are suggested and have different degrees of certainty.
Deductive syllogism:
Syllogism 1
Premise 1: Many students of this University are highly placed and well settled in life.
Premise 2: Most of the highly placed students had biology in higher degree course.
Conclusion: Therefore, taking biology in higher degree course guarantees good placement in future.
Inductive argument:
Observation: Most of the students of the university hold high positions in the society.
Conclusion: The University has a good reputation and placement opportunities of the university are good.

Question 4

Johanna has a reputation for being extremely good at justifying her behavior by a process that is often called "rationalization." For example, she justifies the fact that she eats anything she wants by saying "Ten years ago this food was supposed to be bad for you, and now they are saying it may even have some beneficial effects, so what's the point of listening to the so-called health experts?" or "That movie actor who was really into red meat lived to be 95." Analyze Johanna's arguments by stating them as inductive or deductive arguments; better yet, do the same for one of your own rationalizations.

Question 5

From watching the news or reading the paper, what can you conclude about how the availability heuristic can influence our conceptions of the nature of the lives of different groups of people (for example, movie stars; rich people; various racial, ethnic, or cultural groups) and how accurate these conceptions might actually be?

Question 6

Describe a situation in which you made a poor decision because your judgment was clouded by emotion or some other factor.

Question 7

What is inductive reasoning? What factors contribute to the strength of an inductive argument?

Question 8

How is inductive reasoning involved in everyday experience?

Question 9

Describe how the following can cause errors in reasoning: availability heuristic; illusory correlations; representativeness heuristic.

Question 10

What is the conjunction rule? Describe the experiment involving Linda the bank teller and indicate how it relates to both the representativeness heuristic and the conjunction rule.

Question 11

Describe the male and female births experiment. How do the results of this experiment relate to the law of large numbers?

Question 12

What is the myside bias? Describe Lord's experiment on attitudes about capital punishment.

Question 13

What is the confirmation bias? Describe Wason's experiment on sequences of numbers.

Question 14

What is the basic assumption of the expected utility approach to decision making? What are some examples of situations in which people do not behave to maximize the outcome, as the utility approach proposes?

Question 15

Describe what the behavior of contestants on Deal or No Deal tells us about what determines their decisions.

Question 16

What is the relation between anxiety, optimism, and decision making?

Question 17

What are expected emotions? Describe how expected emotions are related to risk aversion. Describe the Kermer experiment in which subjects rated their expected happiness before gambling and their actual happiness after the results were known.

Question 18

What is some evidence that incidental emotions affect decisions? Consider the relationship between the weather and university admissions, and Lerner's experiment on the relationship between mood and setting buying and selling prices.

Question 19

How does context affect decisions? Describe the prescribing medication experiment, the cesarean delivery experiment, and the parole board study.

Question 20

How does the way choices are presented affect the decisions people make? Describe the examples of organ donations, car insurance policies, and making judgments about the violence of mental patients.

Question 21

Describe the "What Would You Do?" demonstration. Be sure you understand what determines risk aversion and risk taking, as well as the framing effect.

Question 22

What is neuroeconomics? Describe Sanfey and coworkers' (2003) experiment, and indicate what it adds to our understanding of decision making.

Question 23

What is deductive reasoning? What does it mean to say that the conclusion to a syllogism is "valid"? How can a conclusion be valid but not true? True but not valid?

Question 24

What is a categorical syllogism? What is the difference between validity and truth in categorical syllogisms?

Question 25

What is the belief bias? Be sure you understand the results shown in Figure.
Figure
The results of the Evans et al. (1983) experiment that demonstrated the effect of belief bias in judging the validity of syllogisms. The left pair of bars indicates that a valid syllogism with an unbelievable conclusion is less likely to be judged as valid than is a valid syllogism with a believable conclusion. The right pair of bars indicates that the tendency to judge an invalid syllogism as valid is high if the conclusion is believable.

Question 26

What is the mental model approach to determining the validity of reasoning?

Question 27

What is a conditional syllogism? Which of the four types of syllogisms described in the chapter are valid, which are not valid, and how well can people judge the validity of each type? How does changing the wording, while keeping the form the same, influence the ability to determine whether a syllogism is valid?

Question 28

What is the Wason four-card problem? Describe why the 7 card needs to be turned over in order to solve the problem.

Question 29

What do the results of experiments that have used real-life versions of the Wason four-card problem indicate about how knowledge of regulations and permission schemas may be involved in solving this problem?

Question 30

How has the evolutionary approach to cognition been applied to the Wason four-card problem? What can we conclude from all of the experiments on the Wason problem?

Question 31

What is the dual systems approach to thinking? Be sure you understand the properties of System 1 and System 2 and how their operation relates to the various phenomena we have described in this chapter.

Question 32

What would Donders learn if he were to visit a modern cognitive psychology laboratory?