CHAPTER 5: Discussion Questions and Problems
1. Differentiate the following terms/concepts:
a. Primacy and recency effects
A primacy effect is the tendency to rely on information that comes first when making an
b. Salience and availability
c. Fast-and-frugal heuristics and bias-generating heuristics
d. Autonomic and cognitive heuristics
Autonomic heuristics are reflexive, autonomic, non-cognitive, and require low effort
2. Which description of Mary has higher probability?
a. Mary loves to play tennis.
b. Mary loves to play tennis and, during the summer, averages at least a
game a week.
Explain your answer. Define the conjunction fallacy. How does it apply
here? Assume for the purpose of illustration that the probability that
someone loves to play tennis is .2; the probability that someone plays
tennis once or more a week during the summer is .1; and the probability of
one or the other of these things is .22.
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3. Rex is a smart fellow. He gets an A in a course 80% of the time.
Still he likes his leisure, only studying for the final exam in half of the
courses he takes. Nevertheless when he does study, he is almost sure
(95% likely) to get an A. Assuming he got an A, how likely is it he
studied? If someone estimates the above to be 75%, what error are they
committing? Explain.
4. Why are two people who witnessed the same event last month likely to
describe it differently today?
5. How do gambling fallacy and clustering illusion relate to
representativeness? Provide examples from sports. In what way are they
different?
Representativeness exists when one thinks that A should look like B. A can be the sample
