question archive 1) Heuristics and Biases a) What is the representative heuristic? How does reliance on the representative heuristic causes us to ignore base rates and influence our conceptions of randomness? b) What is base-rate neglect? Be prepare to give an example
1) Heuristics and Biases a) What is the representative heuristic? How does reliance on the representative heuristic causes us to ignore base rates and influence our conceptions of randomness? b) What is base-rate neglect? Be prepare to give an example
Subject:PhilosophyPrice: Bought3
1) Heuristics and Biases
a) What is the representative heuristic? How does reliance on the representative heuristic causes us to ignore base rates and influence our conceptions of randomness?
b) What is base-rate neglect? Be prepare to give an example.
c) What is the availability heuristic? What are some of the ways in which the availability heuristic could bias our judgements about the likelihood of the occurrence of certain events? Be prepared to give an example of an application of the availability heuristic.
d) What is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic? Be prepared to come up with your own example.
e) What is a cognitive bias? How can the difference between competence and performance help us to understand the nature of cognitive bias.
f) What are the key features of System 1 and System 2? Do heuristics result from System 1 processing or System 2? Be prepared to explain your response.
2) Motivated Cognition
a) What is the difference between accuracy goals and directional goals?
b) What is the difference between hot cognition and cold cognition? Why do some psychologists believe that hot cognition doesn't exist? Be prepared to explain how a cold cognitive explanation of classic dissonance studies differs from hot cognitive explanations of dissonance studies.
c) Be prepared to explain the set up of a classic dissonance study and the typical findings.
d) We discussed three ways in which goals, emotional attachments, and affect might influence the way you reason about the world. What are these three ways? Be prepared to illustrate these three ways with your own examples.
e) How does the reality of motivated cognition influence our ability to construct persuasive influences to the best explanation? Be sure to give concrete examples of how someone motivated to defend a theory or hypothesis might be biased in constructing an abductive argument. (Hint: This may require you to go back and revisit our discussion of inference to the best explanation in Unit 2)
3) Spinozan Belief Fixation
a) What is the difference between doxastic voluntarism and doxastic involuntarism? Is Spinoza a doxastic involuntarist? Explain.
b) What are the differences between the Cartesian model of belief formation and Spinoza Belief Fixation (SBF) model? Be prepared to describe some of the evidence that Gilbert discussed in support of the SBF model. Also be prepared to explain why Gilbert thinks that the Cartesian model doesn't predict these results.
c) Do you think that the evidence in favor of the SBF model is compelling? Why or why not?
d) What does it mean when we say that Descartes is a methodological skeptic?
4) Big picture questions:
a) Which topic of this unit did you find most fascinating and why? Do you think that any of these topics have real-world consequences or are these just merely interesting laboratory experiments? Be sure to defend your response with examples.
b) Which topic covered in this entire course is most likely to change the way you think about critical thinking in general? Which topic is most likely to influence how you reason about the world in general? Be prepared to come up with examples and to defend your answer.
