Cognitive biases, heuristics, and language acquisition in decision-making

¶ … video primarily uses attorney arguments in a case of alleged sexual harassment and wrongful termination as means of outlining the decision making process. Decisions are often influenced by prior experience and stereotypes rather than by probabilities and the direct facts of a given decision. There are also systematic ways of making decisions -- deliberation -- or through simple cues. In a test for example, the "central route" to persuasion is based on facts and/or knowledge, while "simple cues" can also be used as a form of deductive reasoning to make decisions based on facts external to the actual problem/decision at hand. Another scholar also suggests that both praise and negative feedback have the tendency of bringing performance/decision-making in line with the mean; positive feedback for good performance will reduce the quality of a repeated performance, while negative feedback for poor performance will increase the quality of performance.

Video 13: 5:46-13:06

There are three major heuristics of judgment identified here. Representational information is based on perceptions -- the example of the President walking to his helicopter needing to "look like a leader" making people believe they are good at their job -- is provided. "Availability" refers to how easily information can be retrieved in the brain; facts that are immediately present affect judgment inordinately compared to realities of probability; "anchoring" is a similar process in which information recently processed leads to unrelated conclusions in other circumstances. Decisions are also made with "affective forecasting," or beliefs about which options will make individuals happier. Risks of failure and benefits of success are often exaggerated in people's minds. Preconceived judgments also tend to become strengthened rather than weakened when they are challenged. Intuition and perception also play a large part in much thinking and the decision making process.

Video 13: 19:09-27:13

The case of Genie, who had been deprived of language (as well as other elements of development) until her early teens, shows how vital the early years of childhood are in language development are. Genie was able to build a huge vocabulary of many words, learning them readily and eagerly, but was never able to master putting together grammatically correct sentences with small words like "the" and "a." This also showed, however, that language and communication are not the same thing or mutually dependent, and Genie's intelligence in other areas demonstrated that language abilities are separate from native intelligence and other cognitive factors. Language can also affect the way we think, with "high context" languages and "low context" languages forming a major example of this -- "yes" might not always mean "yes" in certain languages, depending on the context. Different cultural backgrounds shape thinking and language in similar trajectories.