PSYCH 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Prospect Theory, Conjunction Fallacy, Influenza Vaccine
2/21/18
Concepts and Categories
How do we represent concepts?
- Prototpe Theor: represet the aerage of all of our eperiees
o A prototpial dog is the oiatio of all the dogs ou’e see akig it hat ou piture
when you think of a dog
- Exemplar Theory: if you see a new instance of something you compare it to all the stored memories
you have already
o Not storing an average, storing the individual ones
- Theoretiall the prototpe does’t hae to eist
Levels of categories
- Superordinate categories: vehicles, animals, furniture, food
- Basic level categories: cars, cats, chairs
- Subordinate categories: Toyotas, calicos, recliners, porterhouses
Why are concepts useful? Can help have a generalized view of many things
Why can concepts lead us to make errors? We can make errors based on stereotypes when we have
expectations about people
- Gender bias
Judgement and Decision-Making
- Rational choice theory: likelihood x value
o We are bad at reasoning of probability bad at thinking of value
- Do more people die each year from shark attacks or being hit by falling coconuts?
o Availability heuristic: judging the probability of events based on examples that readily come to
mind
▪ Easier to have words come to mind that start with r
▪ Easier to think of a death by shark attack than death by falling coconuts
▪ Turns a principle of memory on its head:
• Frequent associations makes it easy to recall = memory principle
o Peanut butter → jelly
o Salt → pepper
• Eas reall thik it’s a high proailit = aailailit heuristi
▪ BUT: other factors besides frequency affect retrieval
- Conjunction fallacy: thinking 2 events are more likely to occur together than either individual event
- Representativeness Heuristic: people judge probabilities based on the degree that the situation is
similar to, or representative of, their stereotypes of knowledge
o Ex: to get the flu shot or not
▪ Subjects sent with emails of either conditions of opt-in or opt-out
▪ 36% more subjects were vaccinated in the opt-out condition than in the opt-in
- Framing effects: changing how a issue is preseted a hage people’s deisios
- Loss aversion: people tend to want to avoid losses more than they want to achieve gains
- Sunk-cost fallacy: you buy an expensive ticket to a show. On the day of the show, however, you feel
very sick. Do you still go
- Prospet theor: losses atter ore tha gais
- Ahorig effet: ou get the ahorig effet ee he the ahor is opletel irreleat
o
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