PSC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Cultural Bias, Social Intelligence, Availability Heuristic
PSC 001 – Lecture 13 – Thinking and Intelligence
● What is Thinking?
○ Thinking: The manipulation of mental representations (images)
○ Two types of mental representations:
■ Analogical representations: Correspond to and have some physical
characteristics of actual objects or things around us
● Thinking of an apple
■ Symbolic representations: Abstract representations that do not
correspond to physical features of objects or ideas
● Chinese Letters (symbols)
○ Concepts: Group or categorize objects, events, and relations around common
themes.
■ Eaple: Let’s get soethig to eat- koig ou’e gettig food
■ Consists of mental representations & relations between representations
■ Permits more efficient processing
○ Schemas
■ Schemas: Cognitive structures that help us perceive, organize, process,
and use information
● Generalizations about concepts and categories
■ Schemas draw on knowledge of what objects, behaviors, and events
apply to different settings
● Common situations have consistent attributes
● People have specific roles within situational contexts
● Can lead to inaccuracy & bias
■ Scripts: Schemas about sequences of events
● Direct behavior in specific situations
○ At a fast food restaurant- Knowing steps to take
● Learned through experience and observation & shaped by culture
○ Reasoning
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■ Reasoning: Using information to determine if a conclusion is valid or
reasonable
● Can be formal (logical) or informal (intuitive)
● Based on assumptions called premises
● Types of Reasoning:
○ Deductive reasoning (drawing conclusion): Using general
rules to draw conclusions about specific instances
■ Eaple: Heaig a lass is had so ou do’t take it
○ Inductive reasoning (inference): Taking a specific instance
and generalizing it to other instances to draw a conclusion
■ Example: Taking a class and knowing it is hard so
you never take it again.
○ Decision Making
■ Decision making: Attempting to select the best alternative among several
options
■ Decision-Making Tools
● Algorithm: Systematic method that always reach a correct
solution, if one exists
● Heuristics: Mental shortcuts used to reduce the amount of
thinking that is needed to make decisions
○ Metal ules of thu
○ Most of the time, they work fine
○ BUT can sometimes lead to errors!
● Availability heuristic: Estimating the likelihood of an event on the
basis of how readily available other instances of an event come to
mind
○ Can lead to incorrect estimates of the frequency of an
event
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
