Psychology of Thinking (CPSY308), Section 3J0, Winter 2017 Assignment Outline — Due March 31 — Worth 25% Page 1 of 3 The purpose of this assignment is to get you to find examples of course concepts in everyday life. This course is filled with tools and labels that help us understand when and how people (including us) are demonstrating poor thinking (e.g., unfalsifiability, confirmation bias, representativeness heuristic, endowment effect, denying the antecedent, availability heuristic, motivated reasoning, ego depletion, gambler’s fallacy…). Instructions: Find 5 (five) examples you have encountered of poor thinking, and for each example 1) State and describe in your own words and using your own illustrative examples the tool or term from the course that is being demonstrated. For example, Concept 1: Unfalsifiability describes a condition where one’s beliefs cannot be properly put to the test (and so cannot be falsified) due to ambiguity, lack of specificity, lack of available technology, lack of consistency, or having a theory-of-everything that could describe anything in retrospect but could therefore predict nothing. Examples include “the weather will change soon” (unfalsifiable because neither “change” nor “soon” are specific enough to be wrong—they can only be shown correct ) and “aliens built the pyramids” (unfalsifiable because we lack the technology to check the entire universe for wonder-building aliens—it can only be shown correct , if they were to land and take credit). Unfalsifiability is a problem because it prevents us from learning when we are wrong. We can of course still be correct when we hold an unfalsifiable belief, but in the event that it is wrong there will be nothing to show us we are wrong. Since the vast majority of human learning is learning from mistakes, unfalsifiability can be a huge roadblock to personal and epistemic development. Concept 2: Confirmation bias refers to our tendency to see what we want to see, what we expect to see, or even what makes us feel better. We attend more to things that confirm our beliefs than things that could change or challenge them, making us bad at keeping track of disconfirming instances and good at explaining away the ones we do notice as exceptions. Anyone who has watched refereed sports with a die-hard fan has experienced the referees being called “blind” or “biased” when they make decisions against the fan’s team (or fail to make decisions in their favour) and “correct” when they make decisions in their team’s favour (or fail to make decisions in the other team’s favour). The bias being confirmed in this case is that the fan’s own team is morally above drawing penalties (or “just playing the game”) while the opposing team is morally inferior (being given or trying to gain an unfair advantage). Confirmation bias is a problem because it prevents us from keeping accurate track of reality. It makes us feel better about our beliefs, but at the cost of accuracy. Concept 3: The representativeness heuristic refers to our tendency to apply our judgements about one thing to other things that we perceive as being similar or of the same category. The heuristic saves us time because we simply apply whatever we learned about some previous similar thing in the category (or the category itself) to the new thing we have placed in that category (rather than learning something new or solving a new problem). One example might be assuming that a seven-year-old you have not met will not want to sit quietly and read a book, either because your own seven-year-old does not or you think that any human in the category “seven-year-old” has this property. The heuristic can save us time and is often useful and correct, but can also make us wrong (e.g., when our classification or beliefs about the group are wrong) and can be an unfair and lazy way to make judgments.
