08 - Chapter 8: How Judgments Happen

Chapter 8: How Judgments Happen

• S1 can substitute one judg’t for another
• (1) S1 contin’ly monitors exsternal & internal worlds, contin’ly generates assessments,  w. no specific intention, w. little or no effort — these basic assess’ts are easily subst’d for more difficult questions, play impt. role in intuitive judg’t — this is the essential idea of the heuristics and biases approach
• (2) S1 translates values across dimensions, e.g. “If Sam were as tall as he is intelligent, how tall would he be?”
• (3) mental shotgun, S2 may want specific answ. but auto’ly trigger other computations, incl. basic assess’ts

Basic Assessments

• S1 contin’ly assesses for survival threats: How are things? Threat, major opportunity? Normal? Shd I approach/ avoid? — good/bad, escape/approach 
• assess’ts of safety & familiarity à good mood, cognitive ease
• e.g. friend or foe, detect shape of face (shape of chin), smile/frown — assess’t of politicians
• S1 can make many assess’ts, but not all — e.g.
  
   S1 sees towers are same hgt., towers more similar to each other than to middle blocks, but not see that no. of blocks is equal (S2 can determine that)
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    S1 see avg. length of lines, also colour, that not parallel — S1 can also form an immed. impression of no. of objts, precisely if ∃ 4 or fewer, crudely if more — but S1 does not know total length of lines (S2 can calculate) — S1 rep’s categories by a prototype or set of typical exemplars, so it is good w. averages, poor w. totals
• e.g. asked how much you are willing to pay to save birds fr. oil ponds, 2,000 birds, 20,000, 200,000, answers almost same, were responding to prototype, mental image of bird, emotional context, no quantity

Intensity Matching

• intensity (i.e. more of some quantity) — S1 allows matching intensity in several dimensions, transl. betw. diff. scales — e.g. crimes as colors, murder a deeper red than theft — S1 can answ. “Julie read fluently when she was four years old. How tall is a man who is as tall as Julie was precocious?”

The Mental Shotgun

·         the mental shotgun — S1 constantly generates data, when S2 requests one datum, S1 can report multiple

• e.g.  middle sent. more obviously wrong, slower to see the error in first & last because true as metaphor, S1 sees that, hence slower to recog. the falsehood of the state’t
• N.B. mental shotgun + intensity matching = we have intuitive judg’ts about many things that we know little about (see next chapter)

Speaking of Judgment

·         “Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.”

·         “There are circuits in the brain that evaluate dominance from the shape of the face. He looks the part for a leadership role.”

·         “The punishment won’t feel just unless its intensity matches the crime. Just as you can match the loudness of a sound to the brightness of a light.”

·         “This was a clear instance of a mental shotgun. He was asked whether he thought the company was financially sound, but he couldn’t forget that he likes their product.”