PSC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Confirmation Bias
PSC1 Lecture 10 – Reasoning, Judgement, and Decision Making
• Trolley moral dilemma
o Situation where train headed towards a railway track with 5 innocent people
▪ Do you turn the train to head towards a railway track with only 1 innocent
person?
▪ Would you push someone onto the railway to stop the train completely?
▪ Results showed that most people would divert the train track but would not
directly push someone onto the railroad track
• Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received the Nobel Prize for their decision-making
studies
o Are normal people rational most of the time?
▪ Rational thinking based on evidence, logic, and reason, not emotions
▪ Rational means that one’s eliefs are onsistent ith the reasons for haing
those beliefs, and that one’s eliefs are onsistent ith one’s reasons for
making decisions
▪ People generally are irrational and make decisions based on irrational
thought processes
• Predictions on people’s deision-making based on the understanding
that people are generally irrational
o Different types of decision-making
▪ Automatic (reflex) decisions do not involve much thought
• Not necessarily bad because sometimes need to operate without
reflecting on different decisions (such as avoiding a car crash)
▪ Heuristics
• Decreases decision making time and speeds up the thought process
• Introduces distortions, reduces rationality and accuracy of thought
processes
▪ Algorithmic reasoning includes exhaustive reasoning and analysis
o Why are normal people irrational?
▪ Ideas used to organize our understanding of the world makes people
irrational
▪ Biases such as confirmation bias and self-serving bias
• Confirmation bias: when people pay more attention to the
information that is consistent with their prior beliefs
o Extremely resistant to change
▪ Ignore challenges to our beliefs and treat contrary data
as exceptions
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