Social Cognition 2 heuristics

Welcome to the second lecture on social cognition
and we’ll be talking about heuristics. So, before I advance the slide on the next slide
I am going to show you some questions and I want you to pause the video and think about
the answers to the questions and then un-pause the video and we’ll move on. A heuristic
is a mental shortcut and as you can see here we have the original road and then someone
is taking a shortcut. So, heuristics are just these simple things where we, rather than
spend a whole lot of time thinking about something, we jump from one point to another. We do this
because we are cognitive misers. So, we don’t like spending a lot of extra time on something
if we can take a shortcut. The availability heuristic occurs because
people judge things as more likely to happen if those things are easier to imagine. So,
I illustrated this with the shark vs. lightening question and I imagine that most of you said
that more people die from shark attacks than lightening strikes.

But actually, far more
people die from lightening than from sharks. So, on average there are 6 fatal shark attacks
worldwide whereas just in the US there are 32 fatal lightening per year. So, you can
see that there are nearly 5x more fatal lightening strikes just in the US compared to the whole
world fatal shark attacks. So, why does this occur? Well, when you first
think about lightening strikes you are probably picturing some lightening and it’s kind
of hard to imagine someone dying from a lightening strike.
However, when you picture a shark attack (I am giving you a heads up there is a sound
coming), you are picturing something pretty easily. There are a lot of media representations
of shark attacks and whenever anybody is attacked by a shark its all over the news.
And so it’s really easy for us to picture shark attacks and so we judge it as more likely
to happen even though in reality lightening strikes are more fatal.

So, using whether a case “looks like” it belongs to a group rather than using the
base rate of whether something is likely to belong to that group is the base rate fallacy.
So, I illustrated this with this picture of this guy and I asked you and I asked you whether
he was more likely to a hairdresser or an engineer and I imagine that many of you thought
that he was more likely to be a hairdresser. And why is that.

Well we have a schema of
hairdressers and that schema includes the idea that hairdressers are feminine and we
have a schema for engineers and that schema includes the idea that engineers are masculine.
So, this guy is a more feminine looking man than probably many people picture when they
think of a man and so they think “hmm well he’s kind of feminine so I think he’s
a hairdresser”. But, the base rate of hairdresser employment is much lower than engineer employment.
So, you can see that he is far more likely to be an engineer than a hairdresser.

But
the reason why we label him as a hairdresser is because he fits our schema for hairdresser
and we ignore the base rate of those two categories. So, now I am going to ask you how many architects
you think there are knowing that there are more than 1 million engineers.
And what you're probably going to do is think, “Ok that’s the number of engineers”.
So, I don’t think there are quite as many architects; maybe there are 800,000 architects.
Or maybe you will think there are way less architects and so you say 400,000 architects.
So, that is your anchor, that initial number, and you are anchoring on it and then you are
adjusting down.

It could also go the other way, you could adjust up. So, that is anchoring
and adjustment. You have an initial thing and you kind of lock on it and then you move
from that thing. And if you’re curious there are actually
only about 100,000 architects in the US. The framing heuristic essentially says “Hey”
context matters. So, if you are presented information about a school you’ll judge
it more favorably if it has an 80% success rate rather than if you are presented with
information that says it has a 20% failure rate.

Even though those two things are saying
the same thing we would say more positive things about a school that has an 80% success
rate. And why is that? Well the word success is a positive word and we feel good about
that word. And so if somebody talks to us about success we think “Hey that’s a good
thing”. And the word failure is not a very good word, we don’t feel good about that
word, and so if someone is talking about failure rate we think “Oohh that’s really bad”.
So, if you frame something in terms of success people are going to think more positively
about it than if you frame something in terms of failure and that’s the framing heuristic..

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