PSYC20007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Steven Pinker, Mikhail Gorbachev, Observational Error
10 May 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
Lecture 5
- Heuristics and Biases program
- Central idea: judgment and decision-making often rests on simplifying heuristics instead
of extensive algorithmic processing
- Heuristic: a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers
to difficult questions
- Bias: a systematic error of judgment
- Many judgment and decision-making situations were discovered in which participants
gave answers that violated some normative account of how they should be responding,
peoples esposes ee at odds with some ideal standard of how they should respond
- The errors were systematic, there were predictable biases in human judgment and
decision-making
- Focus on systematic errors because they are windows to discover what algorithmic
processes the mind uses, what processes are underlying the systematic errors
- Some of these processes are going to be simple rules of thumb
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- Pinker (Harvard psycholinguist) quote: this body of knowledge is perhaps the most
important contribution of psychology to human life and every educated person should
know this stuff, mentions that he argued unsuccessfully to the administrative in Harvard
that everyone should be taught these stuff
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- “ios idea of Bouded atioalit: ipotat idea to peuso to heuisti ad iases
program
- Social sciences: long tradition of attempting to model humans as rational entities
- Bouded atioalit is a teak to that assuptio → takig ito aout the fat that
constraints that prevent us from making fully rational decisions
- Kahneman and Tversky: goes further, does not assume this sort of simplified
approximation to rational analysis, throws out the assumption that humans reason and
choose rationally
- “io also ooed the te heuisti fo opute siee/atifiial itelligee.
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- Expressed oe sipl, satisfiig is a ule of thu hih sas pik the fist
satisfato alteatie. Its likel to e useful he thee ae a lage ue of
alternatives to compare and the problem is such that determining the optimal choice
would necessitate comparing all alternatives.
- Satisficing is a shortcut: pick the first satisfactory alternative, likely to be useful when
thees lots of alteaties to opae ad deteiig the optial hoie ould
necessitate comparing all the alternatives
- Heuristic was an engineering term
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Central idea: judgment and decision-making often rests on simplifying heuristics instead of extensive algorithmic processing. Heuristic: a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. Many judgment and decision-making situations were discovered in which participants gave answers that violated some normative account of how they should be responding, people(cid:859)s (cid:396)espo(cid:374)ses (cid:449)e(cid:396)e at odds with some ideal standard of how they should respond. The errors were systematic, there were predictable biases in human judgment and decision-making. Focus on systematic errors because they are windows to discover what algorithmic processes the mind uses, what processes are underlying the systematic errors. Some of these processes are going to be simple rules of thumb. I(cid:373)o(cid:374)(cid:859)s idea of bou(cid:374)ded (cid:396)atio(cid:374)alit(cid:455): i(cid:373)po(cid:396)ta(cid:374)t idea to p(cid:396)e(cid:272)u(cid:396)so(cid:396) to heu(cid:396)isti(cid:272) a(cid:374)d (cid:271)iases program. Social sciences: long tradition of attempting to model humans as rational entities.
