Myers PSYCHOLOGY

1
Myers PSYCHOLOGY

• Chapter 10
• Thinking and Language
• Mr. Bandy AP Psychology
• Blue Valley West
• Spring 08

2
Thinking

• Previous chapters explained how we receive,
  perceive, store, and retrieve information. Now
  we consider how our cognitive systems uses this
  information. Thinking, or cognition, refers to
  all the mental activities associated with
  processing, understanding, remembering, and
  communicating. Cognitive psychologists study the
  logical and illogical ways in which we create
  concepts, solve problems, make decisions, and
  form judgments.

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Fact or Fiction

• We notice evidence that contradicts our beliefs
  more readily than evidence that is consistent
  with them.
• The letter k appears more often as the third
  letter of an English word than as the first
  letter.
• In general, people underestimate how much they
  really know.
• It takes less compelling evidence to change our
  beliefs than it did to create them in the first
  place.
• The babbling of an infant at 3 months of age
  makes it clear whether the infant is French,
  Korean, or Ethiopian.
• If not exposed to a language, a group of children
  will make up their own.
• People who lack our words for shapes and colors
  also seem to perceive these features very
  differently.
• Only human beings seem capable of insight (the
  sudden realization of a problems solution).
• Honeybees do a dance to communicate the direction
  and distance of a new food source to other bees.
• Apes are capable of communicating meaning by
  using symbols.

4
Limits of our Intuition (immediate cognition)

• A man bought a horse for 60 and sold it for 70.
  Then he bought the same horse back for 80 and
  again sold it for 90. How much money did he
  make in the horse business?

5
Limits of our Intuition

• In problem solving, we pay attention to only some
  aspects of information and ignore the rest.
• Only that information to which we are attuned is
  available for processing toward a solution.
• Answer 20
• Total amount paid out 140
• Total amount taken in 160

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Thinking

• Cognition
• mental activity associated with processing,
  understanding, and communicating information
• Cognitive Psychology
• the study of these mental activities
• concept formation
• problem solving
• decision making
• judgement formation
• study of both logical and illogical thinking

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Thinking

• Concept
• To think about the countless events, objects, and
  people in our world, we organize them into mental
  groupings called concepts
• mental grouping of similar objects, events, or
  people
• Cars ball angry chair
• To simplify further, we organize concepts into
  hierarchies.
• (Subordinate, Basic, Super-ordinate)
• We form concepts by developing them into
  prototypes.
• The more closely something matches our prototype
  of a concept, the more readily we recognize it as
  an example of the concept.

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Thinking

• Prototype
• the best example of a category
• matching new items to the prototype provides a
  quick and easy method for including items in a
  category (as when comparing feathered creatures
  to a prototypical bird, such as a robin.)
• What is your prototype you use to determine what
  is
• Sexual harassment
• Crime (bullying)

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Thinking

• Is putting things into categories rational and
  does it make us smart??
• Putting people into categories is irrational and
  makes us sexist and racist.
• If it is so great to think about ducks and
  chairs, cars and balls, why is it so terrible
  when we think about genders and ethnic groups?

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Problem Solving

• Algorithm
• methodical, logical rule or procedure that
  guarantees solving a particular problem
• contrasts with the usually speedier but also
  more error-prone use of heuristics

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Problem Solving

• Heuristic
• rule-of-thumb strategy that often allows us to
  make judgements and solve problems efficiently
• usually speedier than algorithms
• more error-prone than algorithms
• sometimes were unaware of using heuristics

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Problem Solving

• Unscramble
• S P L O Y O C H Y G
• Algorithm
• all 907,208 combinations
• Heuristic
• throw out all YY combinations
• other heuristics?

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Problem Solving

• Insight
• sudden and often novel realization of the
  solution to a problem
• contrasts with strategy-based solutions
• Handout jokes and riddles

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Thinking- Insight

• Wolfgang Kohlers experiment on insight by a
  chimpanzee

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Problems with problem solving

• Fixation
• inability to see a problem from a new perspective
• impediment to problem solving
• Confirmation Bias
• tendency to search for information that confirms
  ones preconceptions

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Problems with problem solving

• Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for
  instances that confirm our beliefs rather than to
  search for evidence that falsifies those beliefs.
  The tendency to look for, prefer, and use
  information that confirms our beliefs and to
  ignore and forget information that disconfirms
  our beliefs is ubiquitous.
• For the most part, we are unaware of the many
  times we use confirmation bias because we are not
  consciously aware of the way we are accepting or
  rejecting information.
• List at least one example from the media or
  society in general in which confirmation bias is
  evident.

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Who should be awarded custody?

• Imagine that your serve on the jury of an
  only-child sole custody case following a
  relatively messy divorce. The facts of the case
  are complicated by ambiguous economic, social,
  and emotional considerations, and you decide to
  base your decision entirely on the following few
  observations. To which parent would you award
  sole custody of the child? Parent A, who has an
  average income, average health, average working
  hours, a reasonable rapport with the child, and a
  relatively stable social life, or Parent B, who
  has an above-average income, minor health
  problems, lots of work-related travel, a very
  close relationship with the child, and an
  extremely active social life.

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Who should be denied custody?

• Imagine that your serve on the jury of an
  only-child sole custody case following a
  relatively messy divorce. The facts of the case
  are complicated by ambiguous economic, social,
  and emotional considerations, and you decide to
  base your decision entirely on the following few
  observations. To which parent would you deny
  custody of the child?
• Parent A, who has an average income, average
  health, average working hours, a reasonable
  rapport with the child, and a relatively stable
  social life, or
• Parent B, who has an above-average income, minor
  health problems, lots of work-related travel, a
  very close relationship with the child, and an
  extremely active social life.

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Confirmation Bias

• Most participants chose to award custody to
  Parent B
• When a different group is given the same scenario
  and asked to which parent they would deny
  custody, the majority also selected Parent B.
• When asked who should be awarded custody, people
  look primarily for positive qualities and pay les
  attention to negative qualities (Parent B).
• When asked who should be denied custody, people
  look primary for negative qualities and pay less
  attention to positive

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Confirmation Bias

• Mind reading People who consult mind readers
  tend to focus only on the things that actually
  fit their personality. They ignore any comments
  that do not apply. In this way, people are able
  to maintain their belief in mind readers.
• Astrology Astrology charts often list
  personality traits in very general terms, so that
  they apply to many people. Therefore, it is easy
  to find predictions that seem to be true.

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Confirmation Bias

• Gambling often justify their habit by
  overestimating the probability of winning. They
  recall the times they won and how much, but seem
  to forget the times they lost and the amount they
  lost.
• Stereotypes Beliefs that we have about groups
  of people. If you believe that New Yorkers are
  usually rude and pushy, then you will interpret
  everyday interactions, such as encounters on a
  crowded bus, as being ruder and more more
  aggressive in NY than the same actions they they
  are encountered in a small Midwest town.

22
The Matchstick Problem

• How would you arrange six matches to form four
  equilateral triangles?

23
The Candle-Mounting Problem

• Using these materials, how would you mount the
  candle on a bulletin board?

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Thinking

• Mental Set
• tendency to approach a problem in a particular
  way
• especially a way that has been successful in the
  past but may or may not be helpful in solving a
  new problem

25
Demonstrating Mental Sets

• We are so busy attending to the changes in the
  number of passengers that we dont attend to the
  stops themselves.
• Some of you will get 3 correct because your set
  had you continually processing passenger totals.
• It is nearly impossible to get all questions
  correct. We have a limited capacity to store and
  process new information. We tend to use specific
  strategies that have worked for us in the past.

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Thinking

• Functional Fixedness
• tendency to think of things only in terms of
  their usual functions
• impediment to problem solving

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The Matchstick Problem

• Solution to the matchstick problem

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The Candle-Mounting Problem

• when shown a box with tools, and getting the
  assignment solve problem with help of what you
  see here'', most people do not see the box that
  contained the tools as a tool to be used for the
  solving of A. They saw the box only as a
  container of the tools

Article on fixedness
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Heuristics

• Representativeness Heuristic
• rule of thumb for judging the likelihood of
  things in terms of how well they seem to
  represent, or match, particular prototypes
• If something matches our mental representation of
  a category, that fact usually overrides other
  considerations of statistics or logic
• may lead one to ignore other relevant information

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Representativeness Heuristic

• Linda is 31, single, outspoken, and very bright.
  She majored in philosophy in college. As a
  student, she was deeply concerned with
  discrimination and other social issues, and she
  participated in antinuclear demonstrations.
  Which statement is more likely?
• Linda is a bank teller
• Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist
  movement

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Representativeness Heuristic

• The probability of any two uncertain events
  occurring together is always less than the odds
  of either happening alone.
• We judge the likelihood of things in terms of how
  well they seem to represent or match a particular
  prototype.
• If I meet someone with a laid back attitude and
  long hair, I might assume they are a Californian,
  whereas someone who is very polite but rigid may
  be assumed to be English.
• If I meet three people from a company and they
  are all aggressive, I will assume that the
  company has an aggressive culture and that most
  other people from that firm will also be
  aggressive.

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Heuristics

• Availability Heuristic
• estimating the likelihood of events based on
  their availability in memory
• if instances come readily to mind (perhaps
  because of their vividness), we presume such
  events are common
• Example airplane crash Jaws movie terrorist
  attacks i.e. profiling

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Which of the following are more frequent causes
of death in the U.S.?

• I am ____ certain of my answers.
• All accidents or strokes?
• Accidents (35.7) vs strokes (57.4)
• Homicide or diabetes?
• Homicide (7.1) vs diabetes (25.1)
• Motor vehicle accident or cancer of the digestive
  system?
• (15.7) vs (18.9)
• Drowning or leukemia?
• 1.1 vs. (7.8)

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Thinking

• Overconfidence
• tendency to be more confident than correct
• tendency to overestimate the accuracy of ones
  beliefs and judgements
• 10-6

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Thinking

• Framing
• The same issue presented in two different but
  logically equivalent ways can elicit quite
  different answers
• suggests that our judgments and decisions may not
  be well reasoned,
• those who understand the power of framing can use
  it to influence important decisionsfor example,
  by wording survey questions to support or reject
  a particular viewpoint
• Example What is the best way to market ground
  beef- As 25 fat or 75 lean?

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Framing A

• Threatened by a superior enemy force, the general
  faces a dilemma. His intelligence officers say
  his soldiers will be caught in an ambush in which
  600 of them will die unless he leads them to
  safety by one of two available routes.
• If he takes the first route, 200 soldiers will be
  saved.
• If he takes the second, theres a 33 chance that
  600 soldiers will be saved and a 66 chance that
  none will be saved. Which route should he take?
• Which one should you choose Route 1 or Route 2

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Framing B

• Threatened by a superior enemy force, the general
  faces a dilemma. His intelligence officers say
  his soldiers will be caught in an ambush in which
  600 of them will die unless he leads them to
  safety by one of two available routes.
• If he takes the first route, 400 soldiers will
  die.
• If he takes the second, theres a 33 chance that
  no soldiers will die and a 66 chance that 600
  will die. Which route should he take?
• Which one should you choose Route 1 or Route 2

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Framing

• People who receive A will prefer route 1
• 200 soldiers will be saved
• People who receive B will prefer route 2.
• If he takes the second, theres a 1/3rd chance
  that no soldiers will die and a two-thirds chance
  that 600 will die. Which route should he take?
• Even though they are posing the same question.
• 200 soldiers will be saved (A) or 400 soldiers
  will die (B)
• one-third chance that 600 soldiers will be saved
  and a two-thirds chance that none will be saved
  (A) or
• theres a one-third chance that no soldiers will
  die (B) and two-thirds chance that 600 will
  die(B)

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Thinking

• Belief Bias
• the tendency for ones preexisting beliefs to
  distort logical reasoning
• sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem
  valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid
• Belief Perseverance (aka Mr. Rost phenomenon)
• clinging to ones initial conceptions after the
  basis on which they were formed has been
  discredited

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Artificial Intelligence

• Artificial Intelligence
• designing and programming computer systems
• to do intelligent things
• to simulate human thought processes
• intuitive reasoning
• learning
• understanding language

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Artificial Intelligence

• Artificial Intelligence
• includes practical applications
• chess playing
• industrial robots
• expert systems
• efforts to model human thinking inspired by our
  current understanding of how the brain works

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Artificial Intelligence

• Computer Neural Networks
• computer circuits that mimic the brains
  interconnected neural cells
• performing tasks
• learning to recognize visual patterns
• learning to recognize smells

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Language

• Language
• our spoken, written, or gestured works and the
  way we combine them to communicate meaning
• Phoneme
• in a spoken language, the smallest distinctive
  sound unit changes produce changes in meaning
• 42 basic phonemes in English (869 in human
  language)
• Bat b a t 3 phonemes, add an s 4
  phonemes
• Produce difficulty in learning other languages
• No r in Japanese languageroar produces problems

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Language

• Morpheme
• in a language, the smallest unit that carries
  meaning (that adds to a words meaning)
• may be a word or a part of a word (such as a
  prefix)
• Grammar
• a system of rules in a language that enables us
  to communicate with and understand others

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Morpheme

• Unladylike
• The word unladylike consists of three morphemes
  and four syllables.
• Morpheme breaks
• un- 'not'
• lady '(well behaved) female adult human'
• -like 'having the characteristics of'
• None of these morphemes can be broken up any more
  without losing all sense of meaning. Lady cannot
  be broken up into "la" and "dy," even though "la"
  and "dy" are separate syllables. Note that each
  syllable has no meaning on its own.

46
Morpheme

• Dogs
• The word dogs consists of two morphemes and one
  syllable
• dog, and
• -s, a plural marker on nouns
• Note that a morpheme like "-s" can just be a
  single phoneme and does not have to be a whole
  syllable.
• Technique
• The word technique consists of only one morpheme
  having two syllables.
• Even though the word has two syllables, it is a
  single morpheme because it cannot be broken down
  into smaller meaningful parts.

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Language

• Semantics
• the set of rules by which we derive meaning from
  morphemes, words, and sentences in a given
  language
• also, the study of meaning
• Allows us to make the distinction between
• the truck hit Kyla we would say this if we
  say the accident
• Kyla was hit by the truck how we would
  comment when asked why Kyla wasnt here in class

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Syntax

• the rules for combining words into grammatically
  sensible sentences in a given language
• Appropriate syntax is important in
  understanding
• John kidnapped the boy,
• John, the kidnapped boy
• The boy kidnapped John

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Language

• We are all born to recognize speech sounds from
  all the worlds languages

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Language

• Babbling Stage
• beginning at 3 to 4 months
• the stage of speech development in which the
  infant spontaneously utters various sounds at
  first unrelated to the household language
• One-Word Stage
• from about age 1 to 2
• the stage in speech development during which a
  child speaks mostly in single words

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Language

• Two-Word Stage
• beginning about age 2
• the stage in speech development during which a
  child speaks mostly two-word statements
• Telegraphic Speech
• early speech stage in which the child speaks like
  a telegram go car using mostly nouns and
  verbs and omitting auxiliary words

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Language
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Language

• Genes design the mechanisms for a language, and
  experience fills them as it modifies the brain

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Language
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How do we do it??

• Skinner
• Assocaition, imitation, reinforcement
• Learn to talk in similar ways in which pigeons
  peck.

• Chomsky
• Language is inborn
• Acquire untaught words and grammar too quickly
• Generate many sentences they have never heard of.
• Use morphemes in predictable order
• It just happens

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Language

• New language learning gets harder with age

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Language

• Linguistic Relativity
• Whorfs hypothesis that language determines the
  way we think
• People think differently in different languages.

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Language

• The straight-line part of the dance points in the
  direction of a nectar source, relative to the sun

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Do animals communicate?

• Yes
• Come up with arguments that would lend support
  for this statement.

• No
• Come up with arguments that would lend support
  for this statement.

• Keep in mind the following videos
• Segment 19 If Only They Could Talk
• Segment 20 -- Who Needs Words, Anyway?