benlehrburger/college-text-corpus · Datasets at Hugging Face

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Attribute substitution: a strategy in which you rely on easily assessed information as a proxy for the information you really need
Availability heuristic: relying on availability as a substitute for frequency
Rare events are likely to be well recorded in memory and this makes them more easily available to you, therefore you will overestimate the frequency of those distinctive events and overestimate the likelihood of similar events happening in the future
Judgments made using the availability heuristic of often accurate but do risk error
Representativeness heuristic: relying on resemblance/representativeness as a substitute for probability
We expect each individual to resemble other individuals in a category, but this is not always true (an assumption of homogeneity)
Types of judgments
Frequency estimate: an assessment of how often various events have occurred in the past
Detecting covariation
Covariation: X and Y covary if X tends to be present whenever Y is, and if X tends to be absent whenever Y is absent
Illusions of covariation
Confirmation bias: a tendency to be more alert to evidence that confirms your beliefs rather than to evidence that might challenge them
When judging covariation, selection of evidence is likely to be guided by confirmation bias
Base-rate neglect: people often ignore base rates, particularly when in the presence of other diagnostic information, in part due to to attribute substitution
Base-rate information: information about how frequently something occurs in general
Dual-process models
Ways of thinking: type 1, type 2
Type 1: fast, easy thinking
Not always bad thinking, per se, but certainly less accurate
Type 2: slower, more effortful thinking
Likely to come into play only if it’s triggered by certain cues and the circumstances are right (require sufficient time and effort)
The role for chance
Fast-but-accurate judgments are more likely if the role of random chance is clear in a problem, because people will trust their evidence less and instead pay attention to the quantity of evidence with the idea that a larger set of observations is less vulnerable to chance fluctuations
Education
A person’s quality of thinking is dependent on their education; students who learned statistics make better judgments
Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT): Type 1 thinking performs poorly, Type 2 thinking performs well
Confirmation and disconfirmation
Induction: the process through which you make forecasts about new cases based on prior observations
Deduction: the process in which you start with claims or assertions that you are given and must figure out what follows from those premises
Confirmation bias
Reinterpreting disconfirming evidence
When people encounter information consistent with their beliefs, they’re likely to take the evidence at face value, accepting it without challenge or question
Belief perseverance: ignoring or denying disconfirming evidence
Because memory is malleable and holds a wide variety of prior knowledge, people are often able to circumvent disconfirmatory evidence and find some sort of confirmatory evidence
Logic
Reasoning about syllogisms
Errors in logical reasoning happen all the time, particularly when reasoning about syllogisms
Categorical syllogisms: a type of logical argument that begins with two assertions, each containing a statement about a category
Valid syllogisms: syllogisms in which the conclusion follows from the premises stated
Belief bias: if a syllogism’s conclusion happens to be something people believe to be true anyhow, they’re likely to judge the conclusion as following logically from the premises; conversely, if the conclusion is something they believe to be false, they’re likely to reject the conclusion as invalid
The four-card task
Conditional statements: “if...then…” statements, in which the first statement provides a condition under which the second statement is guaranteed to be true
More sophisticated thinking and accurate reasoning can be encouraged with the right framing and content of the four-card task
Decision making
Costs and benefits
Each decision has certain costs and benefits attached to it
Utility maximization: maximizing the value that you place on a particular outcome
You ought to make decisions that bring you as much utility as possible
Framing of outcomes
Change in how a decision is phrased
Has a large impact on decision-making
If the frame casts a choice in terms of losses, decision makers tend to be risk seeking (they prefer to gamble, attracted by the idea that perhaps they’ll avoid the loss)
If the frame casts a choice in terms of gains, decision makers are likely to show risk aversion (they refuse to gamble, choosing to hold onto what they already have)
People are similarly influence by the framing of questions and evidence
Opt-in versus opt-out
Opt-in decisions: the decision maker must choose to opt in
Opt-out decisions: the decision maker must choose to opt out
Leads to higher participation rates than opt-in
Maximizing utility versus seeing reasons
Reason-based choice: our goal in decision-making is to make decisions that we feel good about and that we think are reasonable and justified
Emotion
Our decisions are powerfully influenced by emotion
Somatic markers: ways of evaluating your options
Anticipated events produce bodily arousal
Orbitofrontal cortex is crucial in our use of somatic markers because this brain region allows you to interpret your emotions
Predicting emotions
Affective forecasting: predictions for your own emotions
Often very inaccurate
People believe that their current feelings will last longer than they actually do
People underestimate their ability to adapt
Research on happiness
Do people know how to make decisions that make them happy?

Chapter 14: Conscious Thought, Unconscious Thought

Consciousness: a state of awareness of sensations or ideas, such that you can reflect on those sensations and ideas, know what it feels like to experience them, and report them to others
The cognitive unconscious: the broad set of mental activities that you’re not aware of but that make possible your ordinary interactions with the worldy
We are generally aware of our mental products but unaware of our mental processes
Memory and perceptual errors are undetectable because the process that brings us a memory/perception is unconscious, so we can’t distinguish genuine recall/sensation from potentially misguided assumption
Unconscious reasoning: thinking that takes place in the cognitive unconscious
Unconscious processing can be rather sophisticated; implicit memory influence us without being aware that we’re remembering implicit memories at all; this influence is mediated by a complex process through which we attribute a feeling of fluency to a particular cause
Unconscious attributions also shape how we interpret and react to our own bodily states
Mistaken introspections: when the sense of knowing our own thoughts is an illusion
People can think they know why they act or react in some particular way but be mistake about the actual causes for their behavior
After-the-fact reconstructions: when people try to explain the reasons behind past thoughts and behavior
Reconstructions can be correct or incorrect, but in either case, they don’t feel like inferences, rather they feel like remembering our own mental processes
Unconscious guides to conscious thinking
Often, we don’t know where our beliefs, emotions, or actions came from
The cognitive unconscious is a support structure for conscious thoughts, particularly at the “fringe”/”horizon” where it shapes and directs thought
This is evident in the effects of framing in decision-making and in the effects of sets in guiding problem-solving efforts
Disruptions of consciousness (further evidence for unconscious processes)
In cases of blind sight and amnesia, patients seem to have knowledge (gained from perception or memory) but no conscious awareness of that knowledge
Blind sight: blind patients insist they see nothing but testing reveals that patients can respond with reasonable accuracy to questions about their visual environment
There may be sections of intact tissue within the brain area that’s been damaged in these patients
Only one or few of the neural pathways carrying information from the eyeball to the brain may be damaged
Subliminal perception: people perceive and are influenced by visual inputs that they didn’t consciously perceive
People are able to integrate subliminal perceptions in conscious assessments
Consciousness and executive control
Cognitive unconscious tradeoffs
The cognitive unconscious allows efficiency but at the cost of flexibility and control

Attribute substitution: a strategy in which you rely on easily assessed information as a proxy for the information you really need

Availability heuristic: relying on availability as a substitute for frequency

Rare events are likely to be well recorded in memory and this makes them more easily available to you, therefore you will overestimate the frequency of those distinctive events and overestimate the likelihood of similar events happening in the future

Judgments made using the availability heuristic of often accurate but do risk error

Representativeness heuristic: relying on resemblance/representativeness as a substitute for probability

We expect each individual to resemble other individuals in a category, but this is not always true (an assumption of homogeneity)

Types of judgments

Frequency estimate: an assessment of how often various events have occurred in the past

Detecting covariation

Covariation: X and Y covary if X tends to be present whenever Y is, and if X tends to be absent whenever Y is absent

Illusions of covariation

Confirmation bias: a tendency to be more alert to evidence that confirms your beliefs rather than to evidence that might challenge them

When judging covariation, selection of evidence is likely to be guided by confirmation bias

Base-rate neglect: people often ignore base rates, particularly when in the presence of other diagnostic information, in part due to to attribute substitution

Base-rate information: information about how frequently something occurs in general

Dual-process models

Ways of thinking: type 1, type 2

Type 1: fast, easy thinking

Not always bad thinking, per se, but certainly less accurate

Type 2: slower, more effortful thinking

Likely to come into play only if it’s triggered by certain cues and the circumstances are right (require sufficient time and effort)

The role for chance

Fast-but-accurate judgments are more likely if the role of random chance is clear in a problem, because people will trust their evidence less and instead pay attention to the quantity of evidence with the idea that a larger set of observations is less vulnerable to chance fluctuations

Education

A person’s quality of thinking is dependent on their education; students who learned statistics make better judgments

Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT): Type 1 thinking performs poorly, Type 2 thinking performs well

Confirmation and disconfirmation

Induction: the process through which you make forecasts about new cases based on prior observations

Deduction: the process in which you start with claims or assertions that you are given and must figure out what follows from those premises

Confirmation bias

Reinterpreting disconfirming evidence

When people encounter information consistent with their beliefs, they’re likely to take the evidence at face value, accepting it without challenge or question

Belief perseverance: ignoring or denying disconfirming evidence

Because memory is malleable and holds a wide variety of prior knowledge, people are often able to circumvent disconfirmatory evidence and find some sort of confirmatory evidence

Logic

Reasoning about syllogisms

Errors in logical reasoning happen all the time, particularly when reasoning about syllogisms

Categorical syllogisms: a type of logical argument that begins with two assertions, each containing a statement about a category

Valid syllogisms: syllogisms in which the conclusion follows from the premises stated

Belief bias: if a syllogism’s conclusion happens to be something people believe to be true anyhow, they’re likely to judge the conclusion as following logically from the premises; conversely, if the conclusion is something they believe to be false, they’re likely to reject the conclusion as invalid

The four-card task

Conditional statements: “if...then…” statements, in which the first statement provides a condition under which the second statement is guaranteed to be true

More sophisticated thinking and accurate reasoning can be encouraged with the right framing and content of the four-card task

Decision making

Costs and benefits

Each decision has certain costs and benefits attached to it

Utility maximization: maximizing the value that you place on a particular outcome

You ought to make decisions that bring you as much utility as possible

Framing of outcomes

Change in how a decision is phrased

Has a large impact on decision-making

If the frame casts a choice in terms of losses, decision makers tend to be risk seeking (they prefer to gamble, attracted by the idea that perhaps they’ll avoid the loss)

If the frame casts a choice in terms of gains, decision makers are likely to show risk aversion (they refuse to gamble, choosing to hold onto what they already have)

People are similarly influence by the framing of questions and evidence

Opt-in versus opt-out

Opt-in decisions: the decision maker must choose to opt in

Opt-out decisions: the decision maker must choose to opt out

Leads to higher participation rates than opt-in

Maximizing utility versus seeing reasons

Reason-based choice: our goal in decision-making is to make decisions that we feel good about and that we think are reasonable and justified

Emotion

Our decisions are powerfully influenced by emotion

Somatic markers: ways of evaluating your options

Anticipated events produce bodily arousal

Orbitofrontal cortex is crucial in our use of somatic markers because this brain region allows you to interpret your emotions

Predicting emotions

Affective forecasting: predictions for your own emotions

Often very inaccurate

People believe that their current feelings will last longer than they actually do

People underestimate their ability to adapt

Research on happiness

Do people know how to make decisions that make them happy?

Chapter 14: Conscious Thought, Unconscious Thought

Consciousness: a state of awareness of sensations or ideas, such that you can reflect on those sensations and ideas, know what it feels like to experience them, and report them to others

The cognitive unconscious: the broad set of mental activities that you’re not aware of but that make possible your ordinary interactions with the worldy

We are generally aware of our mental products but unaware of our mental processes

Memory and perceptual errors are undetectable because the process that brings us a memory/perception is unconscious, so we can’t distinguish genuine recall/sensation from potentially misguided assumption

Unconscious reasoning: thinking that takes place in the cognitive unconscious

Unconscious processing can be rather sophisticated; implicit memory influence us without being aware that we’re remembering implicit memories at all; this influence is mediated by a complex process through which we attribute a feeling of fluency to a particular cause

Unconscious attributions also shape how we interpret and react to our own bodily states

Mistaken introspections: when the sense of knowing our own thoughts is an illusion

People can think they know why they act or react in some particular way but be mistake about the actual causes for their behavior

After-the-fact reconstructions: when people try to explain the reasons behind past thoughts and behavior

Reconstructions can be correct or incorrect, but in either case, they don’t feel like inferences, rather they feel like remembering our own mental processes

Unconscious guides to conscious thinking

Often, we don’t know where our beliefs, emotions, or actions came from

The cognitive unconscious is a support structure for conscious thoughts, particularly at the “fringe”/”horizon” where it shapes and directs thought

This is evident in the effects of framing in decision-making and in the effects of sets in guiding problem-solving efforts

Disruptions of consciousness (further evidence for unconscious processes)

In cases of blind sight and amnesia, patients seem to have knowledge (gained from perception or memory) but no conscious awareness of that knowledge

Blind sight: blind patients insist they see nothing but testing reveals that patients can respond with reasonable accuracy to questions about their visual environment

There may be sections of intact tissue within the brain area that’s been damaged in these patients

Only one or few of the neural pathways carrying information from the eyeball to the brain may be damaged

Subliminal perception: people perceive and are influenced by visual inputs that they didn’t consciously perceive

People are able to integrate subliminal perceptions in conscious assessments

Consciousness and executive control

Cognitive unconscious tradeoffs

The cognitive unconscious allows efficiency but at the cost of flexibility and control