Cognitive Heuristics

• Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision

Louise notes:

• should make a decision that is the most likely to deliver the benefits that we desire. 
• BUT - this would be too difficult as it is very time consuming and we can't be sure of the outcome
• most of the time we are 'satisficers' - making adequate inferences and decisions rather than - 
• 'optimisers' - drawing the best possible inferences and hence reaching the best possible decisions 

Louise notes

• System 1 is automatic, intuitive, unconscious, effortless 
• System 2 requires attention and effort - slow, controlled, deliberate, statistical

Kahneman 

• System 2 engages when circumstances require. 
• As people gain knowledge or expertise, the domains of the two systems change. 

• sample size matters but we often fail to take account of it 
• statistics often produce observations that look like they have causal explanations but are instead due to chance....system 1 is the mode of thinking that makes these incorrect causal connections and jumps to (often wrong) conclusions

Some heuristics that highight system 1:

• representativeness heuristic (a mental shortcut whereby instances are assigned to categories on the basis of how similar they are to the category in general)
• availability heuristic (people make judgements about the likelihood of an event based on how easily an example, instance, or case comes to mind.
• adjustment and anchoring (anchoing is when someone starts with a point and makes adjustments to it to reach their estimate)

Why do we make these mistakes?

• base rate information
• predictive value (how credible is the source?)
• small sample size less reliable

• instruct people to 'think like a statistician'
• instructing people to 'think like a clinician' has the opposite effect
• frowning increases vigilence which leads to enhanced activation of System 2 and consequently increased use of base rate info

• cognitive shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating specific concept or decision

• it's not only about frequency, what about familiarity and salience?
• our own experiences with things happening frequently might be idiosyncratic

So why do we do it?

- The feeling of difficulty/ease of retrieval (system 1) can matter as much as the absolute numbers (content) (system 2)

• one of the most robust and reliable resulsts in experimental psychology
• makes us place weight upon anchors and as a result means we may not always adjust sufficiently far from these anchors to provide accurate judgements

So why do we do it?

• Tversky: deliberate (if insufficent) attempt to adjust from an irrelevant value that provides an anchor: system 2
• Kahneman: anchoring that occurs by priming: system 1

Argued that both of these are right but it depends...

• (system 2:) Found that adjustment is effortful (system 2) and under cognitive load, people adjust less. 
• (system 1:) shown by Mussweiler et al (2000) where anchor primed associated concepts in memroy - 20 degrees as an anchor made it easier to recognise words like sun, and 5 degrees made it easier to recognise words like ski