Question

Since you started PSY101, Smarter Decisions through Psychology, you have had the opportunity to learn about fascinating topics, including the brain and nervous system, emotions, motivation, and stress management. As you learned the psychological concepts and principles covered in this course, you’ve gained insight into what influences decision making and how you can apply what you’ve learned to make better decisions in your own life and career. Through your study of psychology, you’ve also started honing two essential employability skills:

Problem solving to identify and frame problems, explore ideas, and create effective, ethical, and evidence-based solutions based on psychological concepts and principles.

Self and social awareness to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to receive feedback, reflect, and guide one’s thinking.

Questions

In this journal, you will share your reflections on your time in PSY101 by answering the questions below. For each of the questions, write a paragraph-length response (5-7 sentences).

1. As a result of this class, how will you immediately apply your problem solving skill at home or work?

2. As a result of this class, how have you grown in terms of your own self & social awareness skill?

3. Of all of the Strayer videos, which one was most relevant for you? Why?

4. What is one psychological concept that you have learned in this class that was most helpful to you? How will you use this concept to succeed in your personal or professional life?

Answer 1

1. I will try to solve the problem through some steps after the class.. Problem-Solving Cycle:->
The problem-solving cycle includes: problem identification, problem definition, strategy formulation, organization of information, allocation of resources, monitoring, and
evaluation.In considering the steps, remember also the importance of flexibility in following the various steps of the cycle. Successful problem solving may involve occasionally tolerating some ambiguity regarding how best to proceed. Rarely can we solve problems by following any one optimal sequence of problem-solving steps. We may go back and forth through the steps. We can change their order, or even skip or add steps when it seems appropriate. Following is a description of each part of the problem-solving cycle.
1. Problem identification: Do we actually have a problem?
2. Problem definition and representation: What exactly is our problem?
3. Strategy formulation: How can we solve the problem? The strategy may involve analysis—breaking down the whole of a complex problem into manageable elements. Instead, or perhaps in addition, it may involve the complementary process of synthesis—putting together various elements to arrange them into
something useful.
Another pair of complementary strategies involves divergent and convergent thinking. In divergent thinking, you try to generate a diverse assortment
of possible alternative solutions to a problem. Once you have considered a variety of possibilities, however, you must engage in convergent thinking to narrow down the multiple possibilities to converge on a single best answer.
4. Organization of information: How do the various pieces of information in the problem fit together?
5. Resource allocation: How much time, effort, money, etc., should I put into this problem

6. Monitoring: Am I on track as I proceed to solve the problem?

7. Evaluation: Did I solve the problem correctly?

These steps will help me to solve the problem in home easily.

2. Innate and acquired skills will be discussed here

Although a richly elaborated knowledge base is crucial to expertise in a domain,there remain differences in performance that are not explainable in terms of knowledge level alone. There is considerable debate as to whether differences between novices and experts and among different experts themselves are due either to innate talento to the quantity and quality of practice in a domain. Many espouse the “practice makes perfect” point of view.The practice should be deliberate, or focused. It should emphasize acquisition of new skills and applications rather than mindless repetition of what the developing expert already knows how to do.However, some take an alternative approach. This approach acknowledges the importance of practice in building a knowledge and skill base. It also underscores the importance of something like talent. Indeed, the interaction between innate abilities modified by experience is widely accepted in the domain of language acquisition as wella other domains. Certainly, some skill domains are heavily dependent on nurture. For example, wisdom is partly knowledge based. The knowledge one uses to
make wise judgments is necessarily a result of experience (Baltes & Smith, 1990).
Experts in some domains perform at superior levels by virtue of prediction skills.
For example, expert typists move their fingers toward keys corresponding to the letters they will need to type more quickly than do novice typists (Norman & Rumelhart, 1983). Indeed, the single best predictor of typing speed is how far ahead in the
text a typist looks when typing (Ericsson, 2003). The farther ahead he or she looks,
the better the typist is able to have fingers in position as needed. When typists are
not allowed to look ahead in their typing, the advantage of expert typists is largely
eliminated (Salthouse, 1984). Expert sign-language users show variations in sign production in preparation for the next sign (Yang & Sarkar, 2006). Rather than produce one sign in isolation, these signers are looking ahead. Looking ahead allows
experts to produce signs more quickly than do novices. Expert musicians, too, are better able to sight-read than novices by virtue of their looking farther ahead in the music so they can anticipate what notes will be coming up (Sloboda, 1984).Even in sports, such as tennis, experts are superior to novices in part by virtue of their being able to predict the trajectory of an approaching ball more rapidly and accurately than novices (Abernethy, 1991).
Another characteristic of experts is that they tend to use a more systematic approach to difficult problems within their domain of expertise than do novices. For example, one study compared strategies used by problem solvers in a simulated biology laboratory (Vollmeyer, Burns, & Holyoak, 1996). The investigators found that better
problem solvers were more systematic in their approach to the lab than were poorer problem solvers. For example, in seeking an explanation of a biological phenomenon,they were more likely to hold one variable constant while varying other variables.

4. In this uncertain world, decision making is the most important chapter i think atleast for me. I will summarise the concepts pf decision making in the next paragraph.

Early theories were designed to achieve practical mathematical models
of decision making and assumed that decision
makers are fully informed, infinitely sensitive to
information, and completely rational. Subsequent
theories began to acknowledge that humans often use subjective criteria for decision making,
that chance elements often influence the outcomes of decisions, that humans often use subjective estimates for considering the outcomes, and
that humans are not boundlessly rational in making decisions. People apparently often use satisficing strategies, settling for the first minimally
acceptable option, and strategies involving a process of elimination by aspects to eliminate an overabundance of options.One of the most common heuristics most of us
use is the representativeness heuristic. We fall
prey to the fallacious belief that small samples
of a population resemble the whole population
in all respects. Our misunderstanding of base rates
and other aspects of probability often leads us to
other mental shortcuts as well, such as in the
conjunction fallacy and the inclusion fallacy.
Another common heuristic is the availability
heuristic, in which we make judgments based on
information that is readily available in memory, withoutb to seek less available information. The use of heuristics, such as anchoring and adjustment, illusory correlation, and framing effects, also often impairs our ability to make effective decisions.Once we have made a decision (or better yet,another person has made a decision) and the
outcome of the decision is known, we may engage in hindsight bias, skewing our perception of the earlier evidence in light of the eventual outcome. Perhaps the most serious of our mental biases, however, is overconfidence, which seems to be amazingly resistant to evidence of our own errors.What are some of the forms of deductive reasoning that people may use, and what factors facilitate or impede deductive reasoning? Deductive reasoning involves reaching conclusions from a set of conditional propositions or from a
syllogistic pair of premises. Among the various
types of syllogisms are linear syllogisms and categorical syllogisms. In addition, deductive reasoning may involve complex transitiveinference problems or mathematical or logical proofs involving large numbers of terms. Also,
deductive reasoning may involve the use of
pragmatic reasoning schemas in practical, everyday situations.In drawing conclusions from conditional propositions, people readily apply the modus ponens argument, particularly regarding universal affirmative propositions. Most of us have more difficulty, however, in using the modus tollens argumentand in avoiding deductive fallacies, such as affirming the consequent or denying the
antecedent, particularly when faced with propositions involving particular propositions or negative propositions.
In solving syllogisms, we have similar difficulties with particular premises and negative premises and with terms that are not presented in the customary sequence. Frequently, when trying to draw conclusions, we overextend a strategy from a situation in which it leads to a deductively
valid conclusion to one in which it leads to a deductivefallacy. We also may foreclose on a given conclusion before considering the full rangeof possibilities that may affect the conclusion. These mental shortcuts may be exacerbated by situations in which we engage in confirmation bias (tending to confirm our own beliefs).We can enhance our ability to draw well reasoned conclusions in many ways, such as by taking time to evaluate the premises or propositions carefully and by forming multiple mental models of the propositions and their relationships. We also may benefit from training and practice in effective deductive reasoning. We are particularly likely to reach well-reasoned conclusions when such conclusions seem plausible and useful in pragmatic contexts, such as during social exchanges.How do people use inductive reasoning to reach
causal inferences and to reach other types ofc Although we cannot reach logically certain conclusions through inductive reasoning, we can at least reach highly probable conclusions through careful reasoning. When making categorical inferences, people tend to use
both top-down and bottom-up strategies. Processes of inductive reasoning generally form the basis of scientific study and hypothesis testing as a means to derive causal inferences. In addition, in reasoningby analogy people often spend more time encoding the terms of the problem than in
performing the inductive reasoning. Reasoning
by analogy can lead to better conclusions, but
also to worse ones if the analogy is weak or based
on faulty assumptions. It appears that people
sometimes may use reasoning based on formal rule systems, such as by applying rules of formal
logic, and sometimes use reasoning based on associations, such as by noticing similarities and
temporal contiguities.. Are there any alternative views of reasoning?A number of scientists have suggested that people have two distinct systems of reasoning: an associative system that is sensitive to observed similarities and temporal contiguities and a rule-based system that involves manipulations based on relations among symbols. The two systems can work together to help us reach reasonable conclusions in an efficient way.