So, we try to reduce uncertainty in our world
by coming up with rules, heuristics, shortcuts
that seem to help guide us to interpreting our lives and things we
encounter.
And there's a number of heuristics we could talk about: anchoring, adjustment,
working backward, but given our
time limitations and
your good commitment to being here today, let's focus on those you really
need to know for your test...
knowing that there are others sufficient at the intro level. Here's just a couple
of examples.
So, means-end analysis is a heuristic
to breaking problems down. If you've got a problem
that's complex, it would be helpful if you can break it down
into sub-problems and address each of those.
And in doing that you reduce the overall
problem as a result. So if you look at getting a degree.
Getting a bachelor's degree, starting a career...
those are long term, complex problems, but if you break it down and you say, "well a bachelor's degree
is
40 classes, and this semester I'm doing
4 or 5 classes, in this class I've got a syllabus that says we're going to do a paper,
in this paper, I have to have an intro, a methods, a results, and a discussion"
and there you have it breaking down in section to section
rather than being overwhelmed by the overwhelming
perspective of looking at everything as one.
Breaking it down, find what the ends are,
then get the means to achieve them. You break those ends down into sub goals
they become easier and easier to achieve. So this is a fairly practical
approach to dealing with complicated issues that people
oftentimes don't take into accout. They get overwhelmed
because they don't see it as a series of small, solvable problems.
They see it as one really big, unsolvable issue.
So coping with difficulties in life can be helped by some heuristics.
Another one
that's not very helpful and oftentimes leads us astray in our judgments would
be the availability heuristic.
The rule of thumb that the more available information is to us,
the more likely it is to be true. The more probable it is.
If I can think of it quickly...if it comes to mind quickly,
it must be probable. It must be likely that that's a
plausible or even more than likely
plausible. More than plausible, but is probably
the solution. So like...if you think about words with the letter 'R' in them in the
third position,
how many can you think of? And you have to sit there and think
about all the words with the letter 'R' in the third position. You can
think of them: surmise...
There you go, but you see how it takes a little bit of work.
Now think of all the words that begin with 'R' and you can start rolling them off.
And it would be easy, because those are more available,
to think that there must be more of them... because that seems to be
logical. If I can think of lots of them,
then there must be more of them, but there are more words with 'R' in the third position
than there are words with 'R' in the first position. So that's just
the illustration of availability.
Because it's easy to think about, it becomes quite quick that we leap to
the conclusion
that it must be so. So looking at kind of real world example of that....
because an event is prominent
in our memories, seems like it might be more probable that it would happen.
So you look at something like deaths from shark attacks.
So if you're getting ready to go to the beach and you see a
story on a shark attack in Australia and you get to the beach, all of a sudden
you're more worried about getting in the water. Cause that shark attack is
prominent on your mind cause you just saw the media coverage of it
and now you're perhaps overly worried
about getting in the water. That happened back in my day when I was a kid when "Jaws"
came out.
When "Jaws" came out, people started freaking out about getting in the water.
But if you look at it objectively, not in terms what comes to mind quickest,
right? We've got this shark attack,
36 fatalities in the entire history of the United States,
known at the time that this was written.
36 people, right. And people
are freaking out about sharks. Statistics would indicate the probability of being
bitten by a shark,
certainly of being killed by a shark, are exceedingly low.
But what about cancer? Cancer takes about 1.6 million people out a year
and you don't see people fearing a pack of cigarettes,
or fearing carcinogens, or fearing pollutants in their environment,
or fearing things like that as much as they would sharks.
Why? Because cancer's more pervasive, it's not a big media thing when somebody dies
of cancer. When
somebody dies of a lightning strike, or they die of a shark attack,
or a plane crash that we think crashed,
but we're not sure crashed, the next time somebody gets on a plane, they're
wondering if their plane's going to
make it to the next destination even though what's the probability that it
will?
Virtually a hundred percent! It's point nine, nine, nine, something. It's
very likely, but because that idea comes up so easily in people's minds
it leads them astray to thinking that an event is more probable.
I just saw the story of the kid who got cut on razor blades
at the little playground
where he want to play. Somebody, obviously a sick individual, taped razor blades or
glued razor blades to this
jungle gym. He cut his hands. That's very weird
and very awful and very unlikely to happen anywhere else.
You might see some copycat people do it,
but what are the odds it'll be at your playground? Very,
very, very low, but now I bet most parents that go to the playground,
having seen this, that being a very available
thought in mind, will start checking the equipment now where they never would
have thought to do so before.
Not that that's a bad idea, you see, but it's not likely to happen.
But it's more likely to affect their lives because it's so available.
Does that make sense to everybody? That's the essence of the availability
heuristic. Heuristics are subject to fallacies. Obviously there's some fallacies there.
This particular one that you'll want to know for your test is
called the gambler's fallacy.
And essentially what you're looking at is people believe that if something hasn't
happened in a while,
it's more likely to happen, right? Oh, that team's going to win.
They're due for a win, right? They
have this notion that, well, if I'm playing slots, for instance, well I pulled the
lever a hundred times, well surely I'm more likely to win the next time, right?
It's about time for it to happen. That keeps people playing, that's why it's called
gambler's fallacy.
But it's not just in the gambling arena, but you can see quite clearly
if you had somebody flip a fair coin, meaning it's not biased to land on heads
or tails,
right? And they flip the fair coin and they got to 10 heads.
And you say, "What's the next one gonna be?" More people would say
"tails" right. If you got to 50 heads in a row,
and say, "What's going to be next time?" They'll go, "Well it's gotta be tails now, right it's gotta be
tails."
Because it hadn't been tails for so long.
But, in fact, each fair flip is equally likely to become heads or tails.
It is unlikely that you would get fifty in a row but,
statistically speaking, it's no more unlikely to get 51 in a row than 50.
If that makes sense to you, what you're saying then is people who
have this vision of if things haven't happened
recently, they're more likely to happen, would think the same thing about
airplanes, for example. Well there hasn't been an airplane crash in a long time
so maybe it's more likely that there'll be one if I get on it now.
So it leads us astray in our thinking because it's not logical, it's not
probability-based,
it's a heuristic, it's a shortcut, it seems logical,
it seems plausible and people bank on it believing that it must be so.
So they keep persisting at things maybe they should't persist at
or they don't do things maybe they ought to do where probabilities would be in
their favor
or against them because they simply have a fallacy
that it's going to be more likely to happen if it hadn't happened in awhile, whatever
that may be.
Could be anything, not just gambling, but overcoming these heuristics and fallacies
is simply a matter
of becoming conscious of the fact that you're using them as guiding
principles in deciding how to interact with your life and
interpret your life, et cetera.