Psych 458 - Questions to ponder, 5/26/99

Plous AAfterward@ and Buss (1999)

Plous

1. What are some other criteria for judging the value of a decision, besides maximizing utility?

2. How can picking a strategy that is not correct most often still be most rewarding in terms of utility?

3. What is Plous=s Agolden rule@ for de-biasing? What are some kinds of decisions that this strategy works for? (Note: This seems like it might be the good basis for an exam question . . .)

4. What is accountability? How does it affect decisions? Could it be incorporated into decision making experiments and if so, how?

5. How does time pressure affect decision making? How does mood affect decision making?

6. How did Griggs and Cox (1982) improve people=s performance on the Wason card task? In what ways does this support Buss=s points in the other article you read for today?

7. How does culture change some of the decision making findings you have read about? Can you hypothesize the effects of culture on other results you have read about?

8. Imagine you are a researcher. How might your findings be affected by cognitive dissonance and sunk cost traps? What judgment and decision making biases are researchers particularly susceptible to? Do you think researchers are affected by cognitive biases or motivational biases more?

Buss, 1999

1. Contrast Buss=s beliefs about the assumptions of traditional cognitive psychology with assumptions made by evolutionary psychology.

2. Does evolutionary psychology support the idea of general cognitive processing abilities, or domain-specific processing abilities? Why does this distinction make Amismatches@ important?

3. What are the components of adaptive problem solving?

4. The standard for success in evolutionary psychology is reproductive success. Should we hold humans to a higher standard in their decision making?

5. What are two ways of improving people=s performance on the medical diagnosis problem? Which was most effective, and why, according to Buss?