PSYCH 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, Eureka Effect, Confirmation Bias
2/26/18
- The paradox of choice:
o More satisfied if they only had to choose from the smaller number
o More people approached the table with a lot of jams
o More sales from the table with less options
- Making comparisons: how do we choose?
o Participants were more sensitive to differences in average ratings, but not to sample size or
variance
o Care a lot more about the average of stars
o Care if there’s ore reies
- Confirmation bias: tendency to search for confirming evidence, not disconfirming evidence
Problem solving
- Unscrambling a word
- Strategy 1: trying various possible solutions
- Strategy 2: algorithms, logical, step by step procedure
- Strategy 3: heuristics; mental shortcuts that allow us to find a solution more quickly
o Use prior knowledge of English to predict which lets go together
- E: a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the
all ost?
o Less than half were correct when told to do it quickly
o $1.05 and $.05
- Ex: get from LA to Paris, how do you do it?
o Means-ends heuristic: reduce the difference between the current state and the goal state
▪ Divide the big problem into smaller problems, and work from current state to goal state
▪ Can work from biggest-to-smallest sub-problem or from current-to-goal state
- Working backwards heuristics: reversed version of means-end
o Work from goal state to current state
- Insight: sudden realization of a solution
o aha eperiee
o Ex: What one word is related to all three of these?
▪ Sore, shoulder, sweat → cold
▪ Cat, board, sleep → sleep
- Overcoming fixation: incubation
o Incubation – period of not thinking about a problem for a while
Language
- Language is a system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules
of grammar and convey meaning
- Phonemes → words/morphemes → phrases → sentence
- Phonemes
o Smallest unit of sound in a language
o Not the same as the letters of the alphabet
▪ English has about 40
o Can see regional differences
▪ ot aught
o We’re etter at hearig differee etee ategories of souds tha ithi
o “oe pereptio hages ith age…
- Morphemes
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Document Summary
The paradox of choice: more satisfied if they only had to choose from the smaller number, more people approached the table with a lot of jams, more sales from the table with less options. Making comparisons: how do we choose: participants were more sensitive to differences in average ratings, but not to sample size or variance, care a lot more about the average of stars, care if there"s (cid:373)ore re(cid:448)ie(cid:449)s. Confirmation bias: tendency to search for confirming evidence, not disconfirming evidence. Strategy 2: algorithms, logical, step by step procedure. Strategy 3: heuristics; mental shortcuts that allow us to find a solution more quickly: use prior knowledge of english to predict which lets go together. E(cid:454): (cid:862)a bat and a ball cost . 10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the (cid:271)all (cid:272)ost? (cid:863: less than half were correct when told to do it quickly, . 05 and $. 05.
