M29 thinking slides

Thinkingm29

What are they?

How do you know?

What is the most dog-like dog that you can imagine?

Concepts

Concept: a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

Prototype: a best example of a concept

Analogous to schemas andhierarchies

Solving Problems

!?

Algorithm

Heuristic

Insight

0-0-0, 0-0-1, 0-0-2, etc

21-0-0, 21-0-1, 21-0-2, etc

I remember now!

So, let’s try it . . .

Find a partner for a bit of fun

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gConfirmation bias

Fixation

Mental set

Functional fixedness

Confirmation Bias

After committing to a college, students will seek others who have made the same

decision — rather than find others who chose not to attend that college

Fixation

Mental set

Assume that you’re an engineer of a passenger train, and you like to count things...

1. How many stations were there?

2. How many passengers are left on the train?

3. How old is in the engineer?

Mental set

There are six eggs in a basket. Six people take one of the eggs each. How is it that one

egg can still be left in the basket?

Functional fixedness

Decisions & Judgments

Heuristic: a rule of thumb, based on experience, that enables quicker problem solving

List all the English words that start with the letter Q

Three dangers of heuristics:

Representativeness heuristic

Availability heuristic

Overconfidence

Framed decisions

Representativeness

Meeting people in your dorm, you might assume that the laid-back, long-haired guy is from

California, whereas the fast-talking, clean-cut guy is from New York

You meet three players from the University’s Quidditch team, and they are all really nice; you might assume that all Quidditch players are that

way.

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they fit your prototype

Availability

After hearing about several couples who have recently broken up because of infidelity, you

might be more suspicious of your own partner

After news of a school shooting in Omaha, you might think the possibility of a similar attack is

higher than it really is

Judging the likelihood of things based on how easily they come to mind

Overconfidence: tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our own knowledge and judgments

Vacation time vs assignments to do

Overconfidence:Why you shouldn’t show off

Framing: the way an issue is posed can significantly affect decisions and judgments

Condoms are 98% effectivevs

Condoms have a 2% failure rate

85% lean ground beefvs

15% fat ground beef

Belief Bias

Belief bias: the tendency for our beliefs to distort our ability to reason clearly

Beliefs are stronger than logic

Belief perseverance: clinging to one’s initial beliefs despite contrary evidence