Question

How do the availability heuristic,wishful thinking and classical conditioning each have a different negative affect on our ability to critically make decisions or except the validity of an argument

Answer 1

• There are two biases emanating from the availability heuristic:- Ease of recall and retrievability.Because of the availability bias, our perceptions of risk may be in error and we might worry about the wrong risks. This can have disastrous impacts.Ease of recall suggests that if something is more easily recalled in memory it must occur with a higher probability.The availability heuristic distorts our understanding of real risks.
• When we make decisions we tend to be swayed by what we remember. What we remember is influenced by many things including beliefs, expectations, emotions, and feelings as well as things like frequency of exposure.
• Retrievability suggests that we are biased in assessments of frequency in part because of our memory structure limitations and our search mechanisms. It's the way we remember that matters.
• The retrievability and ease of recall biases indicate that the availability bias can substantially and unconsciously influence our judgment. We too easily assume that our recollections are representative and true and discount events that are outside of our immediate memory.
• Managers conducting performance appraisals often fall victim to the availability heuristic. Working from memory, vivid instances of an employee's behavior (either positive or negative) will be most easily recalled from memory, will appear more numerous than commonplace incidents, and will therefore be weighted more heavily in the performance appraisals.
• Wishful thinking, optimism bias - we lean toward seeing things in a positive light which can distort our thinking when evaluating outcomes of our decisions critically. Rather than taking decisions on the basis of evidence and real facts our emotions and beliefs influence our decisions while using wishful thinking which leads to negative effects of the decisions.The real cost, if not danger, I think, has to do with being out of touch with reality. It has to do with not having the mental discipline to see what's really going on versus what one would like to happen.
• Classical conditioning can be regarded as a decision process in which the subject has to decide whether or not to respond with a conditioned response in the presence or absence of the CS. Not responding could lead to negative effects.