Habit Loop and Heuristic

LECTURE 6. Part 2
 Conserving Mental Effort. Heuristics
 We often think in ways that tend to preserve our expectations.
 We pay attention to behaviors relevant to our expectations.
 We interpret ambiguous events/behaviors in ways that support our
expectations.
 We remember people and events consistent with our expectations.
 Cognitive heuristics – mental shortcuts used to make judgments.
 Decision Making and Heuristic
 Algorithm: precise set of rules guaranteed to produce the correct answer.
 Heuristic: rule of thumb and informal strategy to approach a problem that
works under some circumstances (not all).
 Shopping for a jacket
 Heuristics Rationale
 Processing resources are valuable so we engage in timesaving mental
shortcuts when trying to understand the social world (Fiske & Taylor,
1991)
 Timesaving mental shortcuts, called heuristics, reduce complex
judgements to simple rules-of-thumb (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)
 Advantages: (1) quick social judgement and (2) reasonable accuracy
 Disadvantages: Quick and easy - but can result in biased information
processing
 Why use heuristics
 Perfect rationality is computationally demanding.
 In the real world
 Time is short
 Information is limited
 Information is ambiguous
 Cognitive resources are limited
 Decisions under Uncertainty
 Calculating exact probabilities is difficult
 We rely on heuristics to help us, and heuristics lead to biases
 Three heuristics which are responsible for a range of biases and errors are
 representativeness
 availability
 adjustment and anchoring
 Tversky & Kahneman (1974)
 Representativeness Heuristic
 Representativeness heuristic–
a mental shortcut – classifying something as belonging to a certain
category to the extent that it is similar to a typical case from that
category.

 Why is the heuristic demonstrated in the following video can be

classified as representativeness heuristic?
 Representativeness Heuristic
 e.g.
 Police who are looking for a suspect in a crime might focus
disproportionately on Black people in their search, because the
representativeness heuristic (and the stereotypes that they are
drawing on) causes them to assume that a Black person is more
likely to be a criminal than somebody from another group
 Availability Heuristic
 Availability heuristic –
a mental shortcut – estimating the likelihood of an event by
the ease with which instances of that event come to mind.

 Romeo and Juliet

 Salt and pepper

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 Read quickly and try to remember the names

Albert Einstein Rana Ahmed Nancy Oberlin

Sophie Scott Bill Gates Michael Jackson
Mary Smith Julie Shanks Barbara Mulligan
David Cameron Alice Padley George Clooney
Barack Obama Lizzie Gilman Lucy Andrews
Justin Bieber Bob Dylan Martha Collins
Fiona Wilkins Rita Collins John Lennon
Mohamed Salah Marion Dickinson Lina Morgen
Lydia Anderson Elon Musk Sally Fields
Activity

Were there more male or female names on the list?

Answer
 There were more women than men on the list (16 vs 11).
 Why do some people get it wrong?
 Instagirl/boy
 It’s spring break, and all your friends traveled somewhere to Gouna….
 And they’re all posting pictures on Instagram/Facebook.
 And only you are in Cairo. You feel disappointed.

 What you won’t see is that most of your friends are stuck in Cairo, just like you
are. They’re just not posting pictures of themselves on Facebook.
 Why is it an example of Availability Heuristics?
 Availability Heuristics
 People make thousands of decisions per day, but factors such as
 media coverage,
 emotional reactions and
 vivid images

 have greater influence than they would in an entirely rational

calculation.
Think of a number from 1 to 9.

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Subtract 5 from that number.

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Multiply the new number by 3.

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Square this number (multiply by itself).

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 Add the digits of this new number
until you get a one digit number.
 (If you had the number 46 you’d add 4 + 6 to get 10 then
add
1 + 0 to get 1.)
If this number is less then five, add five,
otherwise subtract four.

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Multiply by two.

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Subtract six.

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Map the digit to a letter in the alphabet.

1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.

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Pick a name of a country that begins with
that letter.

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Take the second letter of that country’s name
and think of a mammal that begins with that
letter.

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Think of the color of that mammal.

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How many of you have a gray elephant from
Denmark?

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What’s the trick?
 Denmark is an available “D” country – it easily comes to
mind.
 Elephant is an available “E” mammal – it easily comes to
mind.
 And grey elephants are more available than other-colored
pachyderms.

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 Activity
 What is the difference between the representativeness and
availability heuristics?
 Representativeness Heuristics Vs
Availability Heuristics
 Representative heuristic is where people use existing memories to identify
associated characteristics of an object or a person.
 By contrast, the availability heuristic is where we use existing memories to
identify the likelihood of an outcome occurring.
 Which do you think causes more deaths of Americans:
 terrorist attack or death from an animal?
 Shark attack or death from a falling coconut?
Answer
 The annual chance of being killed by an animal was 1 in 1.6 million per year
from 2008 through 2015. The chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack on
U.S. soil was 1 in 30.1 million per year during that time.
 From 1975 through the end of 2016, 7,548 people have been killed by animals
while 3,438 have been killed by all terrorists.
 150 deaths from coconut a year/5 deaths from shark attack
 Representativeness Heuristics Vs
Availability Heuristics
 The main difference is that a representative heuristic relies on
stereotypes in order to make judgments on objects and
people.
 However, availability heuristic uses recent events in order to
help judge future events occurring.
 Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
 Anchoring and adjustment heuristic – suggests that we favor the first
bit of information we learn.
 When people are trying to make a decision, they often use an anchor or
focal point as a reference or starting point.
 Psychologists have found that people have a tendency to rely too heavily
on the very first piece of information they learn, which can have a
serious impact on the decision they end up making.
What contextual effect is evident here?
 It is a cognitive heuristic where a person starts off with an initial idea and
adjusts their beliefs based on this starting point.

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 Anchoring Experiment
 Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate the
answer to how many African countries were in the
United Nations. They were asked to give the answer as
a percent, but first, they had to spin a wheel. The wheel
itself was destined to land on 10 or 65.
 Those who had the wheel land on 10 estimated that 25
percent of African countries belonged to the United
Nations. By contrast, those who landed on 65
estimated the figure to be much higher at 45 percent.
Kahneman D. & TverskyA. (1974), “Judgment under uncertainty:
heuristics and biases,” Science, 185: pp. 1124-1131.
 People will give more to a charity if the suggested options
are
 $100, $250, $1,000, and $5,000,
 than if the options are $50, $75, $100, and $150
Activity
 Business students were told their professor would be doing a 15-
minute poetry reading. Half were asked if they would be willing to
pay $2 to attend and half were asked if they would be willing to
attend if they were paid $2. After answering, students were then told
that the poetry reading would be free and were asked if they wanted
to attend.

 Would the initial anchoring of the experience’s value affect who

would attend for free?
Ariely, D. (MIT), Lowenstein, G. (Carnegie Mellon), & Prelec, D. (MIT), 2006, Tom Sawyer and
the construction of value. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1-10.
Told would be paid Told would pay
Activity
 How is anchoring relevant to the framing effect and
contrast effect?
 Anchoring and Adjustment
 When we make a decision, particularly without prior evidence, we often assign
a strong level of significance to the first piece of information we see.
 Typically, an individual would tend to integrate all those ideas that fall
within the acceptable range of the anchor and reject those that are not in line
with the anchor.
 So, in all forthcoming arguments, negotiations, estimates, etc. only those
values are discussed that are close to the anchor.
 Narrowing the choice!
 The problem with anchoring and adjustment is that if the value of the initial
anchor is not the true value, then all subsequent adjustments will be
systematically biased toward the anchor and away from the true value.
 However, if the anchor is close to the true value then there is essentially no
problem.
 The Mechanism behind the Anchoring and
Adjustment Effect
 System 1 (subconscious anchoring)
 System 2 (semiconscious adjustment)