Chapter 8 Psychology Notes Thinking Reasoning Language What is Thinking This is a tough question Things that Psychologists consider part of thinking include remembering deciding believing learning Basically it s a broad term for mental activity What the Text Covers Making Judgments The textbook primary covers making judgments and decisions problem solving and language As mentioned in the chapters on memory the brain carries out very complicated tasks but has a limited capacity to do so Often when we make judgments and decisions based on those judgments we have to use limited information to decide something For example you meet someone at a book store After having a conversation they invite you over to their house What do you do We have to use our brain s processing capacity efficiently We often times use time and capacity The Cognitive Miser saving strategies called heuristics Heuristic 1 Representativeness Heuristic 2 Availability Heuristic Representativeness Heuristic Christine is small bookish and wears glasses She is quit thoughtful reserved She was in a Shakespeare play in high school and it changed her life forever She frequently quotes Othello her favorite play Is Christine more likely to be a truck driver or famous poet She s more likely to be a truck driver There are way more truck drivers than famous poets There are so many more truck t drivers that it is highly probably there are more small female bookish truck drivers who like Shakespeare than there are famous poets It is similar to stereotyping It is when you make an assumption about a person or event because it matches a stereotype of another group or events When we get fooled it is because we ignore base rates Christine fits our schema for a famous poet But there are about 3 5 million professional truck drivers in America alone Availability Heuristic Are you more likely to die of the flu or in a tornado The CDC estimates that between 3 000 and 49 000 people in America die of flu a year depending on the severity of the strain The average number of Tornado deaths is around 80 The availability heuristic is when you make a probabilistic judgment based on what most easily comes to mind Hindsight Bias The tendency to believe that we would have predicted something all along or that the outcome of a judgment was obvious Arm chair quarterback Other Ways Pre existing Beliefs Affect Judgments 1 Concepts Our knowledge and beliefs about what core characteristics a set of things shares For example the concept of dog 2 Schema A type of concept Our knowledge and beliefs about how things relate For example think about a football game If you are English football game is soccer and is a very different schema Framing Deliberate Thinking Word of Warning Problem Solving You tell of a group of pregnant women that there is a 10 percent chance a hypothetical allergy medication will cause birth defects You tell the other half there is a 90 the medicine will not cause birth defects Which group reports being more willing to try the medicine The 90 of pregnant women We can think long and hard We can analyze things consciously We can list pros and cons We can recognize our own biases and minimize them When do we think this way Even deliberate thinking is still affected by biases We can minimize our biases by being aware of them but it is very hard to eliminate them Don t assume that reason always leads to reasonable In addition to making decisions we sometimes have to solve problems There is overlap between decision making and problem solving Approaches to Problem Solving Algorithms A se of rules that will always eventually lead to an answer Math formulas are a good example Analogies Using a deep relationship between two seemingly unrelated things to solve a problem Collin Cowherd ESPN commentator explaining why the MLB is less popular than the NFL by making an analogy between baseball and the Republications in 2012 Insight We often unconsciously continue to work on a problem after we stop consciously focus on it Dmitri Mendeleev was trying to figure out the periodic table He stayed up several days and dreamed the solution when he fell asleep 1 When the superficial differences between two things make it hard to see the deep similarities 2 When superficial similarities between two problems make you erroneously believe that the that let you reason by analogy solution to one will work for the other When you keep using a solution that has worked in the past even when it repeatedly fails to When we have trouble imagining alternative uses for objects in order to solve problems Language is a system of communication which combines symbols in a rule based way to express meaning Things that interfere with Problem Solving 1 Salience of Surface Similarities 2 Mental Sets 3 Functional Fixedness Salience of Surface Similarities work on the present problem Functional Fixedness Mental Sets Language Components of Language 1 Phonemes 2 Morphemes 3 Syntax 4 Context Extra linguistic Information Phonemes The basic unit of sound There are around one hundred sounds humans can produce Most languages use about half The international phonetic alphabet lists the known phonemes and gives each one a symbol You can write any word in any language using it psychology safkaled31 Morphemes Morphemes Example The basic unit of meaning Words prefixes and suffixes She played monopoly How many morphemes There are four o She o Play o ed o Monopoly Syntax Syntax is the set of rules every language has for sentence construction Which sentence is correct o A Toledo University Is Ohio In o Toledo Is A University Syntax can vary from dialect to dialect Languages often have a standard form that allows communication between different religions and groups but dialects can vary widely Proper Language 1 2 It allows people with different dialects to communicate You can be bi dialectal It is often associated with being educated and can be helpful when you are trying to be persuasive or apply for a job Dialects Is There a Proper English Language Acquisition The short answer is no despite what English teachers tell you Dialects have always existed and varied widely However proper English is useful for two reasons Children have an ability to hear and produce almost all phonemes when they start to babble Over time they lose it and can hear and produce the language in which they are immersed Word acquisition expands rapidly during late childhood By late adolescence children basically have the