Decision-Making Quiz

In class on Monday, Dr. Goates introduced us to three decision-making heuristics before looking at the decision-making quiz.  These were the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic, and anchoring and adjustment.  I really found them interesting when we applied them to how we reacted and decided to the problems on the decision-making quiz. One I particularly took interest too was the ease of recall part of the availability heuristic.  For example, problem 3 asked whether stomach cancer or motor vehicle accidents caused more deaths in the U.S.  Many of us answered car accidents, and that is because of this ease of recall bias.  This bias is based on vividness and recency, and since very few of us knew of someone with stomach cancer, we all figured accidents caused more death.  Problem 4a and 4b really grabbed my attention as well.  I had put that 7 letter words ending with "ing" would be more common than 7 letter words that had "n" as the sixth letter, which is the same thing.  But because our brain is familiar with the "ing" ending, it automatically relates with that.  I looked right past that it's the same thing and put that it would have more in the paragraph.