PSYC100 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Functional Fixedness, Social Presence Theory, Cognitive Dissonance
31 May 2018
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08 Heuristics in Decision Making
pages 316-321
1. What is “Expected Utility Theory”? What is “Prospect Theory”? What do each predict about
the decisions people will make when faced with a choice?
● Expected Utility Theory: People make decisions by considering the possible alternatives
and choosing the most desirable one. Choose the one with the most value to you.
● Prospect Theory: Theory that weighs both the gains and losses of a decision and its
alternatives
2. How would thinking about the “long run” affect the decisions we make? Do people act as if
they are always thinking about the “long run”?
● Expectations for how decisions will change affective states in the future are powerful
forces in decision making
● People are poor at affective forecasting, or predicting how they will feel in the future
● Most overestimate how happy they will be for positive events, and also overestimate the
extent of negative events
● People don’t always act as if they are thinking about the long run. Most consider the
immediate feelings, i.e when you think about marriage you think about your love right
now for the person, or when someone dies you only focus on the immediate intense
pain
3. Understand each of the biases/heuristics that affect our judgments and decisions: loss
aversion, framing, anchoring, affective forecasting, the availability heuristic, and the
representativeness heuristic. How can we overcome these biases?
● Loss aversion: More concerned with costs than with benefits→ want to avoid all loss
● Framing: The tendency to emphasize the potential losses or gains from at least one
alternative
● Anchoring: The tendency to rely on the first piece of information encountered or
information that quickly comes to mind
● Affective forecasting: The tendency for people to overestimate how events will make
them feel in the future
● Availability heuristic: Making a decision based on the answer that most easily comes to
mind
● Representativeness heuristic: Tendency to place a person or object in a category if the
person or object is similar to our prototype for that category (ex. Someone's
characteristics make you assume they fall into a category because they represent that
group)
● Overcome bias by introducing objectivity into your decision making, and allow
more time for it
09 Problem Solving
pages 322-327
1. What is the definition of problem solving? Be able to identify well-defined and ill-defined
problems.
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● Problem solving: Using available information to achieve a goal
● Well-defined problems=pretty straight forward
○ Ex. How do you get into your car?
● Ill-defined problems=a bit harder to answer
○ Ex. What type of job should you aim for?
2. What does a means-end analysis with subroutines involve, and how does it lead to
successful problem solving?
● Means-end analysis: The problem solver beings by envisioning the end goal, and then
determines the best strategy for attaining that goal
● Subgoals/Subroutines: Breaking down a task into smaller individual tasks
○ Leads to successful problem solving because it helps to overcome obstacles
step by step
3. What makes a subroutine useful?
● Additional subgoals require the development of other skills that can be beneficial to the
problem as a whole
● Not looking at the problem as a whole, you tackle each individual step in a unique
way/able to restructure or apply other mental sets to overcome obstacles
4. What is a mental set? And how does it relate to both successful problem solving, as well as
the difficulty of functional fixedness? How can we overcome functional fixedness? (Understand
the use of restructuring, sudden insight, and analogy.)
● Mental sets: Problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past
○ Established ways of thinking
○ Sometimes make it difficult to find the best solution because we have a fixed
idea, just like functional fixedness
● Functional fixedness: Having fixed ideas about the typical functions of objects
○ To overcome, the problem solver needs to reinterpret an object's potential
function
● Restructuring: A new way of thinking about a problem that aids its solution
○ Ideally, the new view reveals a solution that was not visible under the old
problem structure
● Sudden insight: The sudden realization of a solution to a problem
○ The “Aha” moment”
● Analogy: Creating an analogy and connecting the structure of one problem to the
structure of another event or problem
○ Because the structures are the same, the solutions may be the same
○ Analogous solutions work only if we recognize the similarities between the
problem we face and those we have solves and the analogy is correct
10 Group Membership, Obedience, and Compliance
pages 496-509, 516-517
1. What are ingroups and outgroups. How are these groups formed and maintained?
● Ingroups: Those groups to which particular people belong
● Outgroups: Those groups to which they do not belong
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Document Summary
Expected utility theory: people make decisions by considering the possible alternatives and choosing the most desirable one. Choose the one with the most value to you. Expectations for how decisions will change affective states in the future are powerful forces in decision making. People are poor at affective forecasting, or predicting how they will feel in the future. Most overestimate how happy they will be for positive events, and also overestimate the extent of negative events. People don"t always act as if they are thinking about the long run. Loss aversion: more concerned with costs than with benefits want to avoid all loss. Framing: the tendency to emphasize the potential losses or gains from at least one alternative. Anchoring: the tendency to rely on the first piece of information encountered or information that quickly comes to mind. Affective forecasting: the tendency for people to overestimate how events will make them feel in the future.
