For questions about organisms' ability to make reasoned decisions that are optimal for achieving a goal or solving a problem.
23
votes
2answers
295 views
Do students exhibit rational behavior in determining study time?
While I teach some economics classes, I must admit to near complete ignorance on the optimization processes students undertake when studying. We often say that the "best" students are those who earn ...
18
votes
1answer
934 views
What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?
There are many theories/disciplines that have been categorized as Pseudoscience in the Scientific community.
The list includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like Graphology, ...
12
votes
2answers
567 views
What are popular rationalist responses to Tversky & Shafir?
In the early 90s Tversky & Shafir observed several violations of rationality in human participants, in particular violation of the disjunction effect and sure-thing principle. This has lead to ...
11
votes
2answers
450 views
What tasks does Bayesian decision-making model poorly?
Bayesianism has been a relatively successful paradigm for modeling decision-making. However, not every psychologist is a bayesian, and there are tasks such as the Tversky & Shafir (1992) ...
9
votes
4answers
422 views
How is motivation influenced by chance of reward?
Sometimes, I work on a project where there is a chance that the whole project will become irrelevant before it is finished. I have noticed that even though I believe that the risk of this happening is ...
9
votes
2answers
107 views
Do people estimate combined probabilities differently to uncombined ones?
Suppose, somebody has to estimate the likelihood of one of the following events (or has to estimate which event is more likely):
A coin is tossed six times and each time the result is heads. ...
9
votes
0answers
73 views
Human behaviour in one-shot perfect information games
Background
A one-shot game is one where two participants have some set of actions $\{1, ... , n\}$, they make their decision on which option to take (without knowing the decision of their partner, or ...
8
votes
2answers
167 views
How can the success of Bayesian models be reconciled with demonstrations of heuristic and biased reasoning?
In recent years, Bayesian models of cognition have been used - with considerable success - to explain human reasoning in a variety of inferential tasks (Chater, Tenenbaum, & Yuille, 2006). These ...
5
votes
0answers
93 views
Online datasets for the disjunction effect and violations of the sure-thing principle
The disjunction effect (or violation of the sure-thing principle) is as follows:
A disjunction effect occurs when people prefer x over y when they know that event A obtains, and they also ...
2
votes
1answer
50 views
Which branch of psychology deals with decision making under stress?
Our decisions are usually based on a system of perspectives, which in turn are based on one's own set of values. However there are traumatizing situations where this system of perspectives is turned ...
2
votes
0answers
65 views
Causal reasoning(implicit models?) vs grammar of native language
I was reading about linguistic relativity and it struck me that there could also be differences in multilingual individuals and mono/bi-lingual individuals on how they derive/reason/create structure ...
1
vote
2answers
648 views
What is the definition of sanity? How can I prove someone either sane or insane?
In my experience the definition of insanity is thus:
Insanity: The state of being seriously mentally ill, mad, and/or irrational.
Is there a proper scientific definition of this term? While ...
1
vote
3answers
102 views
Is fear rational? [closed]
Let's suppose a big ugly monster thingy wants to eat you. While you're running away from it, you're feeling fear. Can this situation be considered one where fear would be rational?
