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Fill in the Blank Questions
1. The ________ is the mistaken belief that events go together when in fact they do not.
illusory correlation (p. 362)
2. On your last exam you did much better than you usually do. Unfortunately, according to the law of ________, on your next exam you will most probably get a lower score, closer to your aver-age performance.
regression to the mean (pp. 363–364)
3. When deciding between two options, if one is recognized and the other isn’t, many people will go with the option that they are familiar with, exemplifying the ________.
recognition heuristic (p. 366)
4. A heuristic is ________ if it produces useful inferences by exploiting the structure of information in the environment.
ecologically rational (p. 366)
5. Sometimes the person who knows ________ is able to make a better judgement, according to the ________ effect.
less; less-is-more / less is more (p. 367)
Short Answer Questions
1. What is syllogistic reasoning?
Syllogistic reasoning is the process of drawing a logically valid conclusion from two given premises. (p. 342)
2. What criterion is used to judge the validity of a syllogism?
The validity of a syllogism lies in whether the conclusion necessarily follows from the given premises according to the rules of logic. The truth or falseness of a premise is irrelevant to the validity of a syllogism. (p. 344)
3. What are the two most influential approaches to the study of syllogistic reasoning? Briefly de-scribe each.
The two most influential approaches to the study of syllogistic reasoning are the mental models approach and the natural deduction systems approach. According to the mental models approach people use the premises of a situation to construct a mental model, from which they then draw conclusions. The natural deduction systems approach, on the other hand, describes syllogistic logic as proceeding to basic rules of inference carried out on the given propositions. (pp. 346-351)
4. What is an iconic mental model and how does it produce more information than is given to it?
An iconic mental model is a mental model whose structure is the same as the situation it represents. Iconic mental models produce more information than is put into them by adhering to the principle of emergent consequences, which states that once a mental model is constructed, certain relationships that were not evident in the premises used to construct the model become evident. (p. 349)
5. What evidence exists in support of the natural deduction systems approach?
Rips showed that when people solve a reasoning problem, the time it takes them and the number of errors they produce depend on the number of inferences needed to solve to the problem. (p. 351)
6. How was Wason’s generative problem used to demonstrate reasoning bias?
Wason’s generative problem asked people to generate hypotheses through repeated trial and error. In performing this task people often generated a working hypothesis and then tested number sequences that were consistent with the hypothesis, rather than testing sequences that were inconsistent with it. This led to ineffective hypothesis testing and demonstrated the confirmation bias. (pp. 352–353)
7. What is the law of large numbers and how can it lead to the gambler’s fallacy?
When tossing an unbiased coin, the probability of heads is always 50 per cent. The law of large numbers states that, given a large enough number of tosses, the average incidence of heads should approximate 50 per cent. This leads many to believe that if several coin tosses have come up tails, in order that the overall average approximate 50 per cent, the next toss is more likely to come up heads. This mistaken assumption is known as the “gambler’s fallacy.” The truth is that even after a long stretch of “tails,” the probability of heads is still 50 per cent. (pp. 358)
8. What is illusory correlation and what two sources of bias influence this error of reasoning?
Illusory correlation occurs when people falsely believe that two events occur together when, in fact, they do not. Availability and the confirmation bias can lead to this error. (pp. 362)
9. A child performs particularly poorly on a midterm exam. As a result, her parents punish her for not trying hard enough. On the final exam the child performs better than on the midterm exam and more in line with her usual grades. Why are her parents incorrect in thinking that their punishment caused the child to perform better on the final exam?
When the child performs particularly poorly, this performance is seen as an extreme deviation from the mean (or her usual performance). The law of regression to the mean dictates that her next performance is more likely to return to her usual performance level. This is the case regard-less of any parental influence. When this actually occurs and the child performs better on the final, the parents misattribute the cause of the better performance to their punishment and not to the statistical law. (pp. 363–365)
10. What is the recognition heuristic and how can it lead to the less-is-more effect?
The recognition heuristic states that when making a choice between two alternatives, if one of the alternatives is recognizable while the other is not, then we are more inclined to choose the recognizable alternative. This can lead to the less-is-more effect when one knows too much about a certain topic to take advantage of the recognition heuristic. (pp. 366–367)