Intuition and Unreason

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Intuition and Unreason
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Types of Influences

• Influence to cause or lead to a particular
  behavior
• Situational Influences Influences tied to the
  environment or circumstances surrounding action
• Effort
• Attention
• Participation
• Dispositional influences Characteristics of an
  individual (regardless of the situation)
• Personality
• Intelligence
• Demographic Characteristics

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Fundamental Attribution Error

• What causes the behaviors seen in the clip?
• Driver
• Old Lady
• The tendency for observers to overestimate
  dispositional influence and underestimate
  situational influences on others behavior

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Intuition

• Unconscious thought process- seems to lack
  reason. Knowing information without evidence
• Schemas- information sorted into mental
  categories
• Emotional Reaction- dont require thought or
  analysis
• Expertise- special training can lead to automatic
  recall of information

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Problems with Intuition

• Overconfidence Phenomenon
• The tendency to be more confident than correct
• We overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs
• College Student Experiment
• Students asked if they would declare a major,
  pass a class, or live off campus the next year
• Students that were 87 confident of their
  predictions were wrong 50 of the time
• Students that were 100 confident of their
  predictions were wrong 15 of the time

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Problems with Intuition

• Extra Credit Quiz Grade!
• 10, 5, 1

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Problems with Intuition

• Confirmation Bias
• The tendency to seek information that confirms
  our beliefs/preconceptions rather than disprove
  them
• The number experiment proved the confirmation
  bias in 23 out of 29 people
• Never considered doubting their preconception
  overconfidence
• To remedy overconfidence ask and seek an answer
  to the question why do I believe this?

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Unreason

• What good fortune for those in power that people
  do not think.
• Adolph Hitler
• Humans are the species most capable of reason,
  yet we also tend to over-generalize and make
  irrational decisions
• There are four ways in which people sustain false
  beliefs

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Our Preconceptions Control our Interpretations

• We respond not to reality, but to reality as we
  construct it
• What we already believe about the world will
  shape how we perceive new information, even if
  the new information is contradictory
• We can be easily influenced by others

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We are More Swayed by Events than Facts

• Clearer mental image stays with us longer
• Clouds our judgment into believing false
  information
• You are more likely to die in a car crash than a
  plane crash

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We Misperceived Correlation and Control and
Create Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• Illusory Correlation- perception of relationship
  when none exists
• Cloud Seeding Experiment
• Illusion of Control- Perception that
  uncontrollable events are subject to our
  influence
• Gambling
• Dice players have shown a pattern of throwing
  soft for low numbers and hard for high numbers
• Regression toward the average
• All data will move towards the average over time
• Self- Fulfilling Prophecies