Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cognitive Decision Making CB
Cognitive Decision Making CB
Introduction
What is Cognitive Psychology?
• Study of perception, learning,
memory, thought, and language in
knowledge acquisition
AssumptionsCognitive Psychology
- Mental processes exist
• Concept Formation:
• The way people organize and
classify events and objects,
usually to solve problems
Concept Formation
• Classification:
• Separating dissimilar events,
finding commonalities, and
then grouping similar items
together One of These Things
(Is Not Like The Others)
Problem Solving
• Problem solving
• Confronting and
resolving situations that
require insight or
determination of some
unknown elements
How do we solve new Problems?
• Learning Theory
• Trial-and-error
• Gestalt Theory
• Insight
• Information-Processing
Theory
• Purposeful registration and
retrieval of information.
Figure 7.2 Stages in Problem Solving
Approaches to Problem Solving
• Algorithm
• Strategy involving applying a set of
rules until the problem is solved.
• Efficient
Barriers to Problem Solving
• Functional Fixedness
• Inability to see that an object can
have a function other than its
stated or intended use.
• Mental Set
• Limited ways of thinking about
possibilities.
• Creativity involves breaking out
of mental sets.
Creative Problem Solving
• Creativity:
• generating ideas that are original,
novel, and appropriate.
• Original responses:
• do not copy or imitate another
response
• Novel responses
• are new or have no precedent
• Appropriate responses
• are reasonable in terms of the situation
Ways of Thinking
Convergent Thinking
• Narrowing choices and
alternatives to arrive at one
answer.
• Limits creativity
• Example:
• Where is the Eiffel Tower?
Ways of thinking
Divergent thinking
• Expanding options.
• Facilitates creativity
Reasoning
& Decision
Making
Formal REASONING
• Information provided
• Method available (e.g. algorithm)
• One correct answer
Informal
• Information often missing
• No method
• Multiple solutions
DECISION MAKING
Gambler’s Fallacy:
The belief that an event is
more likely to occur if it
has not recently occurred.
Barriers to Good Decision Making
Belief in small numbers
Decision based on a small number of
observations
Barriers to Good Decision Making
Availability heuristic
Judging the probability of an event
based on how easy it is to think of
examples of it
Barriers to Good Decision Making
Overconfidence
Being so committed to one’s own
ideas that one is often more
confident than correct
Barriers to Good Decision Making
Confirmation bias
People cling to beliefs
despite contradictory
evidence
Barriers to Good Decision Making
Fallacy of Composition: