With reference to relevant research studies, to what extent is one cognitive process reliable
If you, as most people tend to, answered "librarian" for the most likely answer to the above question, you may be missing a key extra detail that is important for accurate decision-making. Steve seems likely to be a librarian because his description matches a stereotype that we have for librarians. However, before we decide that he's definitely a librarian... we should also ask the question "how common is it for anyone to be a librarian, compared to the other careers?" Being a librarian is not that common a career, certainly not related to others such as farmer or doctor. Simply because of the numbers of people in the jobs involved, Steve is therefore far more likely to be a farmer or doctor than a librarian (regardless of the description of his personality)!
Heuristics and biasesA heuristic is a 'mental shortcut' - a rule that we use to help us make decisions quickly without having to spend a lot of time researching and analyzing information.
The 'Steve' problem above illustrates one way that these heuristics work, by using stereotypes and preconceived ideas about people and things to make decisions. Often, of course, this strategy is effective (and very time efficient!), so we get away with it. Sometimes, however, the system can lead us to make bad, or irrational decisions. Kahneman and Tversky's famous paper below was one of the first to study these decision making biases in detail. |
Study 1 - Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Kahneman and Tversky (1974)
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Kahneman and Tversky's famous research into decision making and heuristics can be read above. Although they summarised a large number of experiments, there were three broad categories of heuristics that they identified as important in decision-making:
These three, amongst others, are well summarised by Michael Britt on the video on the left. |
Assignment 1 - Describe the heuristics
Having read the paper and watched the video above, from memory try to summarise each of the three main types of heuristic identified by Kahneman and Tversky (1974).
Which heuristic?Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which of the following two alternatives is more probable? 1. Linda is a bank teller. 2. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. What would most (85%!) people answer here? Which heuristic does this illustrate? |
Which heuristic?German judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench first read a description of a woman who had been caught shoplifting, then rolled a pair of dice that were loaded so every roll resulted in either a 3 or a 9. As soon as the dice came to a stop, the judges were asked whether they would sentence the woman to a term in prison greater or lesser, in months, than the number showing on the dice. Finally, the judges were instructed to specify the exact prison sentence they would give to the shoplifter. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8 months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence her to 5 months.
Which heuristic does this illustrate? |
Is this really so bad? Evaluating Kahneman and Tversky...
There are four main areas of criticism of Kahneman and Tversky's conclusions about decision-making.
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The enormous impact of the research on the fields of Psychology and Economics is clearly a huge positive for the research. In addition, the results of the experiments described by K+T have proved very reliable, and have been replicated many times in many different scenarios
Satisficing - making decisions that are 'good enough'A task is to sew a patch onto a pair of jeans. The best needle to do the threading is a 4 inch long needle with a 3 millimeter eye. This needle is hidden in a haystack along with 1000 other needles varying in size from 1 inch to 6 inches. Satisficing claims that the first needle that can sew on the patch is the one that should be used. Spending time searching for that one specific needle in the haystack is a waste of energy and resources.
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Study 2 - Kahneman et al (2005) - Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?
A Focusing Illusion
Does money make you happy? What does the evidence say?
Kahneman et al (2005) use this and other evidence to suggest that money doesn't make the difference to our happiness that we suspect it will do. They claim that we overestimate the effect of money on happiness due to the focusing illusion.
What are focusing illusions?
“The focusing effect (or focusing illusion) is a cognitive bias that occurs when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event, causing an error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.“
Have you ever seen an advert which made you really want something (even when you probably didn't need it)? Over the next few days, suddenly you notice things that remind you of the product everywhere, and eventually you REALLY want it. Then you buy whatever it is... and the reality turns out to be fine, but not as amazing as you'd convinced yourself it would be. If this sounds familiar, then you may have fallen prey to the focusing illusion. Anchoring and focusing illusionsAnchoring (see above) is an example of a kind of focusing illusion, as we are having our attention drawn to a particular thing, which then plays a disproportionate role in out decision making.
In anchoring, the focus is on a number or a statement which then makes us guess answers which are closer to the anchor. However, the focusing effect can also occur in other areas, such as through advertising where we focus on objects. |
As well as the video above, Daniel Kahneman writes about the focusing illusion here and talks about it in this video.
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The Method
Kahneman et al report:
"To test the focusing illusion regarding income we asked a sample of working women to estimate the percentage of the time that they were in a bad mood in the preceding day. Respondents were also asked to estimate the percentage of time people with pairs of various life circumstances (Table 1), such as high- and low-income, typically spend in a bad mood. Respondents’ predictions were compared to the actual reports of mood provided by participants in the survey with the relevant circumstances." Specifically, respondents had to answer the following question: Now we would like to know overall how you felt and what your mood was like yesterday. Thinking only about yesterday, what percentage of the time were you: in a bad mood____%, a little low or irritable____%, in a mildly pleasant mood____%, in a very good mood____%. Bad mood was reported as the sum of the first two response categories. |
Assignment 2 - Predict the hypothesisBased on your knowledge of the focusing illusion, what would you expect the results of such a question to be?
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Results
Kahneman et al report:
The predictions were biased in two respects. First, the prevalence of bad mood was generally overestimated. Second, consistent with the focusing illusion, the predicted prevalence of a bad mood for people with undesirable circumstances was grossly exaggerated. For example, the average respondent predicted that people with income below $20,000 per year would spend 58 percent of their time in a bad mood, compared with 26 percent for those with income above $100,000 per year; the actual percentages were 32 percent and 20 percent, respectively. The focusing effect clearly explains the second of these two results. We expect people in difficult financial circumstances to be constantly thinking about their hardship (focusing on it), when in fact most people's lives are taken up with mundane concerns at any one time. |
Why is this important? The applications of decision-making research
Economics and the 'rational agent' theoryDaniel Kahneman's work on decision making won him a Nobel prize... in Economics! What was the relevance of these experiments to economic theories?
For 200 years, the subject of economics had used a very clear model of human behaviour to produce their theories. Humans were creatures who knew what they wanted, and rationally worked out what the best thing for them to do was in each situation. By 'best thing', of course, we mean the thing that will bring maximum benefit to them as an individual. This economic decision making process is the same when choosing breakfast cereal as it is when making investments or choosing whether or not to get married: we add up the benefits and the costs, and make our decision according to which option will bring the most benefit. |
The unreliable, irrational process of human decision makingWhat Kahneman and Tversky showed, was that in contrast to the 'rational agent' ideas of Economics (see left), the process of human decision making was far from a rational process! We frequently make irrational decisions, based on heuristics and stereotypes which may be incorrect.
An example of irrational decision making. This could perhaps be explained by the availability heuristic: people who win the lottery are given a lot of media attention and coverage, therefore it may be easy to recall an instance of a lottery winner to mind. In contrast, people dying from smoking will be far less prominent. As a result, we overestimate the chances of a lottery win and underestimate the possibility of the smoking-related disease.
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How can we make better decisions?
In his book 'Thinking, fast and slow', Kahneman suggests that we have two types of reasoning systems:
“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control” “System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations” Heuristics and biases are tools used by system 1 to allow it to operate quickly and efficiently, without being too much effort for us. Therefore, it is clear that we might benefit from strategies which help us to consciously use system 2 more often (though this is not easy to do - see the criticisms above!) Engaging System 2Tom Ewing on Brian Juicer Blog gives the following tips for 'slow' thinking:
1. Account for luck: Understand that most good (or bad) outcomes will have a random factor in ('luck'), which we cannot control. 2. Consider alternative outcomes: Rather than giving a probability to the outcome you want to happen (or to avoid), create several different outcomes and try to allot probabilities summing to 100 for each. You won’t necessarily get the right probability but it’s more likely to be realistic. 3. Run a premortem: Before you settle on a plan, run a “premortem” – ask people involved to imagine themselves a year in the future, telling a story of why the plan failed. The point isn’t “negativity” – it’s a way of turning up factors you might have not included, because of optimism and overconfidence. |
22 mark section B question
All sections with a Level 3 command term can be assessed in a 22 mark essay (remember that a learning objective with a 22 mark command term could also come up as an 8 mark question, but not vice versa).
Although any Level 3 command term could be asked, we'll concentrate on the one given in the learning objective, so the question is With reference to relevant research studies, to what extent is one cognitive process reliable? (22) You will need to plan an essay which will be about 2-3 sides of A4 long, including a detailed focus on the command term. The marking criteria are below. ALWAYS refer to these before you begin to plan your essay. It is crucial that you know what the examiners are looking for so that you can write exactly what is needed for top marks! |
Planning a great 22 mark questionKNOW THE COMMAND TERM! This is absolutely crucial! A different command term requires a different style of essay, so you need to tailor what you write to the question. You will still be able to use the same pieces of information, but how you use them may vary.
PLAN PLAN PLAN! Every year the examiners' comments mention that essays which are clearly planned score the best marks. FOLLOW THEIR ADVICE! Don't be afraid to spend up to 10 minutes in an exam planning your essay (and longer earlier in the year when are learning and practising). USE EVIDENCE! You have 2 detailed studies here to use, but you should also look to find triangulating evidence using other experimental methods or from other areas of the syllabus EVALUATE! You must evaluate the studies you present. Evaluating means talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the study as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the level of analysis as a whole with reference to the question (e.g. reductionist explanation of genetics in some behaviour) |
Revision |
ExtensionA very detailed list of psychological theories of decision making (most of which illustrate how easily our decisions can stray from the 'rational) can be read here. Following the findings of Kahneman and other experiments, and the weight of these new theories, economics has begun to adapt its theories to accommodate heuristics and other psychological ideas. A nice overview of this new science can be seen in the picture below - which is a very different picture from the 'rational agent' of previous theories!
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