Lecture 21
Cognitive 1
- Directed Thinking
- Varieties of Directed Thinking
- Category Specific Deficit
- Logical Reasoning
- Inductive Logic
- Evidence Gathering Pitfalls
- Confirmation Bias
- Decision Under Uncertainty
- Rational Choice Theory
- Expected Utility
- Gains and Losses
- Framing Effects
- From Impossibility to Certainty
Overview
Throughout most of this course, we have focused on psychological phenomena that humans have in common with other animals. In today's lecture, we departed from that approach by exploring problem solving and decision making. Both topics are studied by cognitive psychologists, who examine how people process and use information. Other animals also process information, but none do so at anything even approaching the sophistication of a very young child.
We began by noting that people ordinarily organize information into categories (e.g., a carrot is a vegetable, a cucumber a fruit), and this tendency may be an innate, biologically-determined one. We then discussed different forms of logical reasoning, noting that people make some predictable errors when they use inductive logic. We ended by discussing decisions under uncertainty. These decisions involve choices between two courses of action in situations where the outcomes are unknown. Research by Kahneman and Tversky has shown that decision framing affects how risky people are in situations of uncertainty.
Specifics
- Be familiar with four forms of directed thinking.
- Identify the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, and know which one produces more certain conclusions.
- Discuss several "evidence gathering pitfalls" that characterize the way people normally reason inductively.
- Be familiar with rational choice theory, expected utility (including the math involved in calculating it), and the predictions it makes about decisions under uncertainty.
- Be familiar with Kahneman & Tversky's work on decision making, focusing on risk taking, framing effects, and the psychological impact of going from impossibility to certainty.