Cognitive Processes in Decision Making

Thought Processes

• Information Processing: Thinking involves taking information, building models of the world, setting goals, and planning actions.
• Representations: Analogical representations capture actual characteristics (e.g., maps, clocks). Symbolic representations are abstract (e.g., words, concepts).
• Schemas and Scripts: Schemas are frameworks for knowledge about a topic (e.g., dog vs. horse). Scripts are schemas for specific events (e.g., restaurant visit). Schemas and scripts allow for fast processing but can reinforce stereotypes.

Decision Making and Problem Solving

• Decision Making: Selecting the best choice from multiple options, weighing evidence, assessing risks, comparing options.
• Problem Solving: Overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal, using various strategies.
• Heuristics: Mental shortcuts helping in decision-making. They are quick but can lead to biases.
• Relative Comparison: Using comparisons to judge value, including anchoring (relying on the first piece of info) and framing (emphasizing gains or losses.)
• Availability Heuristic: Making decisions based on readily available information, leading to overestimating risks.
• Affective Heuristic: Using emotions to make decisions.
• Representativeness Heuristic: Placing a person or object into a category based on similarity to a prototype.
• Paradox of Choice: Too many choices lead to conflict and dissatisfaction; fewer choices lead to higher satisfaction.
• Problem-Solving Strategies:
• Organization of subgoals: Planning a route to the goal, developing strategies for obstacles, tracking progress and evaluating results.
• Mental sets: Using past problem-solving strategies, which can be problematic.
• Functional fixedness: Inability to think of novel usages for objects.
• Restructuring: Reframing a problem.
• Working backward: Starting from the goal.
• Algorithms: Guidelines guaranteeing a correct answer.
• Analogies: Transferring elements of one problem to a similar one.
• Insight: Sudden realization of a solution.

Intelligence

• Definition: The ability to reason, make decisions, understand events, solve problems, understand complex ideas, learn quickly, and adapt to environmental changes.
• Measurement: Stanford-Binet Intelligence Quotient (IQ) measures intelligence, calculated as (mental age/chronological age) × 100.
• Theories:
• Spearman's General Intelligence (g-factor): One general factor underlies intelligence.
• Cattell's Theory: General intelligence (g) consists of fluid (abstract reasoning) and crystallized (knowledge) intelligence.
• Gardner's Theory: Multiple intelligences exist.
• Sternberg's Triarchic Theory: Analytical, creative, and practical intelligence components.

Language

• Definition: A system for communication, using sounds and symbols governed by grammatical rules.
• Infinite Generativity: Capacity to generate an endless number of sentences.
• Language Structures:
• Phonology: Basic speech sounds.
• Morphology: Smallest units of meaning.
• Syntax: Rules for combining words and phrases.
• Semantics: Underlying meaning.
• Language in the Brain: Broca's area (speech production), Wernicke's area (speech comprehension). Aphasia results from damage to these areas.

Emotion

• Definition: Immediate, specific, negative or positive response to events or thoughts. Emotions have psychological, behavioral, and feeling components.
• Feeling vs. Mood: Feeling is the subjective experience; mood is a diffuse, long-lasting emotional state with no identifiable object.
• Circumplex Model: Emotions are plotted on valence (positive/negative) and activation/arousal (calm/alert).
• Primary and Secondary Emotions: Primary emotions are innate, adaptive, and universal (e.g., joy, sadness). Secondary emotions are blends of primary emotions.
• Amygdala and Emotion: Processes emotional significance, generates emotional reactions, involved in social stimulus perception. Information reaches amygdala via 2 pathways: fast (thalamus-amygdala), and slow (thalamus-cortex-amygdala).
• Major Theories of Emotion: Common sense, James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer (two-factor).
• Misattribution of Arousal: Mistaking the source of arousal.

Motivation

• Definition: Underlying process energizing, guiding and maintaining behaviors toward a goal.
• Motivational States: Energizing, directive, persistent, and strong.
• Types of Motivation:
• Extrinsic: Behavior driven by external rewards.
• Intrinsic: Behavior driven by internal feelings.
• Yerkes-Dodson Law: Optimal performance results from moderate arousal.

Personality

• Definition: Consistent pattern of thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses.

• Personality Traits: Enduring characteristics influencing behavior.

• Temperaments: Broad tendencies to feel or act in specific ways.

• Situationism: Behaviors determined by situations more than personality traits.

• Interactionism: Behaviors influenced by both situations and personalities.

• Assessing Personality: Idiographic (individual-focused), nomothetic (common traits).

• Measures:

• Projective: Ambiguous stimuli to reveal unconscious processes (e.g., Rorschach, TAT).

• Self-Report: Participants rate themselves on traits.

• Behavioral: Measures actual actions.

• Theories:

• Trait Approach: Emphasizes individual differences on traits.

• Big Five Theory: Five factors (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) describe personality.

• Biological Trait Approach: Traits based on biological processes.

Needs and Drives

• Needs: State of deficiency prompting goal-directed behavior, biological or social (e.g., water).
• Drives: Psychological state creating arousal to satisfy needs.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Sequence of needs that must be met; basic needs first.