Study Guide for Final Exam
 

Intelligence

  1. Contrast the "g" approach to intelligence with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.
  2. What are the three parts of Sternberg's triarchic theory? What does Sternberg mean by practical intelligence?
  3. What is tacit knowledge?  Give an example.

Cognitive Development

  1. Research on cognitive development has shown that young children manifest many abilities at ages younger than Piaget would have predicted. Give examples of two such abilities, and describe the experiments that demonstrate these abilities in infants or young children.
  2. Define these terms: object permanence, dishabituation, conservation task, visual cliff, violation of expectation method
  3. How does Renee Baillargeon show that babies understand solidity and continuity of objects?  What are these concepts?  What do babies understand about occlusion, containment, and covering.

Judgment & Decision Making

  1. What is the difference between a normative and a descriptive theory?
  2. Define these terms:  reason-based choice, loss aversion, risk aversion, accessibility, reference dependence
  3. What is the normative theory of decision making under uncertainty and why?
  4. What is the representativeness heuristic? Describe two judgment biases that result from use of this heuristic. For each one, explain why it is a bias and how representativeness can account for it.
  5. Explain the following judgment biases: availability bias, conjunction fallacy, anchoring bias. Why does the conjunction fallacy occur?
  6. Explain the following concepts: trade-off, conjunction fallacy, base rate neglect, attraction effect, dominance
  7. Apply Expected Utility Theory to the following example: you are deciding whether or not to get a flu shot. The probability of getting the flu this winter is 50% with the shot and 75% without the shot. The relevant utilities are: no shot & no flu: 1.00; shot and no flu: 0.90; no shot and flu: 0.10, shot and flu: 0.00. What should you choose and why?
  8. Draw a risk averse utility function for money. Why is it called risk averse?
  9. What were the result of the class peppermint patty/marshmellow rabbit experiment? What decision bias did this study demonstrate, and how can Prospect Theory account for it? What alternative accounts (besides Prospect Theory) would explain the findings? If you were going to replicate the study, what improvements would you make to the study design?
  10. Following are a list of biases. Explain why they violate Expected Utility Theory and how Prospect Theory can account for them. (Be sure to specify which part of Prospect Theory accounts for each).
    • a. Asian flu framing effect
    • b. Jacket/calculator mental accounting
    • c. Theater ticket mental accounting
    • d. Endowment effect
    • e. Certainty effect
    • f.  Reflection effect
  11. Which of the following are normative and which are descriptive?
    • Expected Utility Theory
    • Protoype heuristic
    • Principle of invariance
    • Prospect Theory
    • Principle of regularity
    • Reason-based choice
    • Attribute substitution
  12. Compare and contrast system 1 and system 2, as Kahneman describes them.
  13. What does Kahneman mean by the difference between "state" and "change"?  Which one is more influential for decisions?
  14. A patient undergoes a colonoscopy procedure and afterwards rates how unpleasant the experience was.  What features do and do not influence this retrospective evaluation?
  15.  Below are two graphs showing Anabel’s and Bert’s utility functions for money.  Anabel and Bert are both given a choice between (i) receiving $25 for sure vs. (ii) a 25% chance to win $100 (with a 75% chance to win nothing).  Which option will each person choose and why?

Anabel

Bert

 
 

  1. In a class experiment, students were randomly assigned to either receive a peppermint patty candy or marshmallow rabbit candy.  They were then asked whether they wished to keep their initially endowed object or switch to the other object. What were the results?  What decision bias do these results display?  Why descriptive theory can explain why this bias occurs?
  2. What decision biases occur when additional options are added to the decision maker's consideration set?  Why do these biases occur?
  3. Describe the results of the Schwartz et al. (2004) study on physician decision making.