Chapter 12 - Judgment:
1. What is the difference between inductive and deductive judgment?
2. Why is disconfirming evidence valued more than confirming evidence?
3. What is the confirmation bias? Belief perseverance? Know the results of the bogus feedbackon social skills experiment and how it demonstrates confirmation bias and belief perseverance.
4. What is a heuristic and how is it different from an algorithm?
5. What is the availability heuristic and what is it used for (hint: judgments of frequency)?
6. What is the trade-off when using the availability heuristic?
7. How can it explain why we tend to overestimate highly unusual or emotional events that receive a lot of our attention, such as deaths by homicide, plane crashes, lottery winning, etc.?
8. Under what circumstances do we use frequency estimates?
9. Know the Overestimation experiment that showed that availability governs frequency estimates.
10. What are some sources of availability bias?
11. Know the anchoring experiment that showed our inability to overcome the availability effect.
12. What is the Representativeness Heuristic, its assumptions, and what is it used for?
13. Know the experiments that show our tendency to reason from the "population to the instance" (Gambler's Fallacy, Insensitivity to Sample Size).
14. Know the experiment that showed our tendency to reason from the "single case to the population" (Prison experiment).
15. What is the conjunction fallacy? What is the base rate fallacy (also as evidenced in Disease Diagnosis)?
16. What do experiments on these two fallacies tell us about our tendency to rely on representativeness?
Chapter 13 - Reasoning and Decision Making:
1. With which method can you determine if a belief is true - Confirmations or Disconfirmations (think about the rooster story)? Also how does this relate to valid and invalid forms of reasoning (see common error vs. the right way in the syllogism section)?
2. What are categorical syllogisms? How do participants typically perform on categorical syllogisms?
3. What are conditional syllogisms? What are the different valid and invalid arguments (Modus ponens, modus tollens, converse, and inverse)?
4. Why logic is misunderstood (e.g. belief bias)? Be able to appropriately determine if a syllogismis valid or invalid.
5. What is the four-card task? How do participants typically perform on the task (what cards do they tend to pick)? What two cards should be turned over instead? What does this task demonstrate (hint: confirmation bias)? Be able to give me the correct cards that should be turned over with novel examples. What makes the task easier (results in fewer errors)?
6. What is utility theory? What is the difference between objective utility and subjective utility?
7. What is the framing effect? What do we mean when we speak of a decision's "frame"? Know the experiments (Disease Experiment, Money Experiment, & the Parent Custody Experiment) showing that a person decisions/choices may be influenced by how a problem, options, or question is framed.
8. Know that the research on framing effects reveal that people are more likely to take courses of action that involved an element of risk (i.e. risk-seeking) when they problem is framed in a way to make them focus on potential losses (instead of gains).
Chapter 14 - Problem-solving:
1. What is the difference between an algorithm and a heuristic?
2. Compare and contrast the different problem-solving heuristics, including their advantages and disadvantages (e.g. hill-climbing, working backwards, means-end analysis, mental imaging, pictures and diagrams, analogy, etc.).
3. Which strategies are more appropriate for which problems (e.g. Tower of Hanoi, Hobbits and Orcs, Water Jar, nine-dot, candle, two-string problem, etc)?
4. What are the limits of the hill-climbing strategy?
5. What are some difficulties in problem-solving (e.g. functional fixedness, Einstellung, mental setor problem-solving set).
6. Know the problems and experiments that demonstrate our difficulty in solving some types of problems.
7. What is illumination?
8. What do studies of interruption during problem-solving reveal?
This is the book used in class. Reisberg, D. (2016). Cognition: Exploring the science of the mind (6th ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-29328-9