PHI2100 Exam 2 Study Guide By the time you take the second exam you should be able to Explain what dual process theory is o is the theory that people reason in two fundamentally different ways and that this division in reasoning explains many of the puzzles that arise regarding how people actually reason and make decisions Type 1 reasoning system 1 fast automatic effortless capable of multi tasking and not fully voluntary Ex 2 2 4 detecting one object more distant than another Type 2 reasoning system 2 slow serial effortful requires make a disgusted face when shown a gross picture drive on an empty road concentration and is more voluntary than System 1 Ex focusing your attention on something looking for a woman with white hair searching your memory to identify a familiar sound monitoring behavior telling someone your phone number Explain the roles of System 1 and System 2 in reasoning and the limitations of each system o Limitations of system 1 Has biases or systematic errors that it is prone to make Intuitive answers can often be incorrect but can be checked by system 2 Illusions Self control System 1 is impulsive system 2 keeps this in check Does not calculate sums well Explain what a heuristic is and give some original examples o A quick procedure that helps find adequate answers to difficult questions o We are constantly making basic assessments about the external world and substituting target questions with heuristic question How much would you contribute to save an endangered How happy are you with your life these days How should financial advisers who prey on the elderly be Target question species punished Heuristic question dolphins How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying rhinos or What is my mood right now How much anger do I feel when I think of financial predators Explain what substitution is and how it takes place o A substitution is something we do when we rely on a heuristic something we do when we use heuristics another o A substitution occurs whenever we rely on a heuristic to swap one question for o System 1 answers one question in place of another Basic assessments made by constantly monitoring the external world It computes similarity and representativeness of certain attributes It infers causality from certain events It evaluates the availability of certain item Ex Who would make a better candidate You make an assessment of how the person looks rather than basing your decision off of facts Translating values across dimensions Ex translating amount of anger into amount of sound Offering multiple answers for any question that System 2 asks Intensity matching o System 1 can match anything that falls on an intensity continuum and translate it to another intensity continuum o Ex Which shade of red best represents an armed robbery Mental Shotgun o System 1 is constantly making basic assessments it has many assessments on hand for answering problems usually giving us more relevant answers than we want o Ex Explain the law of small numbers why smaller samples give extreme results more often than larger samples and how System 1 interprets these extreme results o The smaller sample allows the incidence to be much higher or much lower than it is in the larger population o System 1 looks for causal explanations and doesn t handle statistics well so System 1 tries to explain the difference in rates causally rather than by analyzing the statistics o We are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see Explain the halo effect and give an original example o The tendency to like or dislike everything about a person including things you haven t observed o We observe a few traits and think we have a good enough idea of the entire person similarly we see a small sample and think we have a good enough idea of the entire population Ex you meet someone when they are having a bad day so you think the person is generally mean and rude but in reality they are usually very friendly and pleasant Explain the difference between frequency and absolute spread and use this difference to explain why the gambler s fallacy is a fallacy o If we flip a coin over and over 100 times in a row the frequency of heads and tails will tend toward 50 o But the absolute spread or the difference between the number of heads and number of tails won t necessarily decrease Ex Suppose the first 15 out of 20 flips come out heads So far the frequency is 75 heads 15 20 So far the absolute spread is 10 15 heads 5 tails Does the coin have to come up tails more often now to make up for the fact that it has come up heads so often No this is gambler s fallacy Explain the hot hand fallacy o We infer causation or intentionality in any pattern or regularity Ex if Bobby makes several baskets in a row and then makes her next 2 baskets he has hot hands Bobby makes several baskets and then misses his next 2 baskets he has hot hands but then got overconfident and is now cooling off Explain hindsight bias easy explanations and give an original example o Our System 1 sees the world as much more ordered and easy to understand than it really is o The illusion that you understand the past fosters the illusion that you can predict and control the future o An I knew it all along phenomenon o Ex After you turn in your test you think you did poorly when you get your test back and you see you got an A you say I knew I got an A I studied so hard o Ex I knew Steve would be fun at the party because when we showed up he was drunk I knew Steve would be awful at the party because when we showed up he was drunk Explain how to identify and avoid easy explanations o Whenever you offer an explanation for some phenomenon or behavior ask yourself If the opposite had happened could I have explained that too If so this is probably an easy explanation with a false sense of understanding Could I have predicted this before it happened If not this is probably an easy explanation with a false sense of understanding Explain what the anchoring effect is and give an example o When one s estimate of a quantity is closer to a particular value that was o Sometimes it happens as an adjustment system 2 or a result of priming Priming effect see anchors as informative and use them for that previously considered effect system1 reason Ex There are more than 6 million people living in Florida How many people live in Florida o Ex real estate business negotiations soliciting donations Explain how to avoid the anchoring effect o Activate