01:830:101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Representativeness Heuristic, Scoliosis, Satisficing

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: 01:830:101
• Professor: ESTELLE MAYHEW

Document Summary

Decision making: attempting to select the best alternative among several options. Problem solving: finding a way around an obstacle to reach the goal. Heuristics: shortcuts used to reduce the amount of thinking that is needed to make decisions: subconscious: free up cognitive resources, adaptive: fast, can result in biases: errors, faulty decisions. The representativeness heuristic: tendency to assume that if an item is similar to members of a particular category, it is also a member of the category. It is better to make these judgements in light of the available base rate information that is, the data about the frequency or probability of a given item or event. People tend to use only the representativeness heuristic and fail to consider the frequency data. Anchoring: the tendency in making judgement to rely on the first piece of information encountered or information that comes most quickly to mind.