Thinking, Language and Intelligence
Psychology · Section 3.1 · 18 study cards
Concepts and problem solving, the heuristics that bias judgement, how language develops, and what intelligence tests do and do not measure.
Practice this set → Spaced repetition, card by card. No account needed.
Method
Separate the three topics by the question they answer
Thinking asks how we solve problems and where judgement goes wrong. Language asks how the system is built and how children acquire it. Intelligence asks what is being measured and how well. Deciding which of the three a question belongs to prevents most wasted effort.
Name the bias from the cue in the scenario
- Is the judgement based on resemblance to a typical case while ignoring how common the categories are? That is representativeness.
- Is it based on how easily examples come to mind, usually because they were vivid or recent? That is availability.
- Did a number mentioned earlier pull the estimate? That is anchoring.
- Did the wording of two equivalent options change the choice? That is framing.
- Is the person searching only for supporting evidence? That is confirmation bias. Holding a belief whose evidence has been withdrawn? Belief perseverance.
- Is past unrecoverable investment driving the decision? That is the sunk-cost fallacy.
Write the cue as well as the name, because exam answers are usually marked on the justification.
Learn the language stages as ages plus what is new
Cooing brings vowels, babbling brings consonant-vowel syllables and then narrows to the native language, the one-word stage brings words used as whole messages, and telegraphic speech brings word order with function words stripped out. Overgeneralisation errors are the evidence for rule learning, so quote one whenever the nature-nurture debate is asked.
Hold the intelligence theories as a list of contrasts
- Spearman: one general factor, g, from factor analysis.
- Thurstone: several primary mental abilities.
- Cattell: fluid versus crystallised, with opposite lifespan trends.
- Gardner: many relatively independent intelligences.
- Sternberg: analytical, creative, practical.
Keep reliability and validity strictly apart
Reliability is consistency, validity is accuracy, and a test can have the first without the second. When a question describes a test that gives stable scores that predict nothing, it is testing exactly this, and the answer is reliable but not valid.
Definitions and theorems
Worked example
Linda is 31, single, outspoken and studied philosophy, and as a student she was active in campaigns against discrimination. Asked whether she is more likely to be a bank teller, or a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement, most people choose the second. The same people, asked to estimate the risk of dying in a plane crash shortly after a widely reported crash, give figures several times higher than a month later. Name the errors, explain the mechanism in each, and say what the person should have done instead.
Handle the Linda item first. The description is being compared to a stereotype and the judgement is following the resemblance, so this is the representativeness heuristic.
State why the answer is wrong on logic alone. Feminist bank tellers are a subset of bank tellers, so the compound cannot be more probable than its component. This is the conjunction fallacy.
Name what was ignored: the base rate. There are far more bank tellers than feminist bank tellers, and base rates should dominate a vague personality sketch.
Now the plane crash item. The estimate rose because a vivid, recent, heavily reported instance came easily to mind, and fell once it faded. That is the availability heuristic.
Show the discrimination explicitly: representativeness runs on similarity to a prototype, availability runs on ease of retrieval. The clue in the second scenario is that nothing about the risk changed, only how recently an example was encountered.
Connect both to dual-process thinking. Each is a fast, automatic System 1 answer that arrives before deliberate reasoning and feels correct, which is why the errors survive even in people who know the statistics.
State the corrective in each case: begin from base rates rather than the description, and estimate risk from frequency data rather than from recalled examples.
Common mistakes
- Mixing up representativeness and availability. Ask what the judgement is running on. If it is similarity to a typical case, with base rates ignored, it is representativeness. If it is how easily an example is remembered, driven by vividness or news coverage, it is availability.
- Saying heritability means an individual's intelligence is mostly genetic. Heritability describes how much of the variation within a particular population, in a particular environment, is attributable to genetic differences. It never applies to one person, and it never explains a difference between groups.
- Claiming language determines thought. The strong Whorfian version is rejected. Argue only the weak version, that language influences categorisation, memory and attention, and cite colour discrimination or absolute spatial terms rather than the discredited snow-vocabulary story.
- Treating reliability as evidence of validity. A consistent test can measure the wrong thing consistently. Scenario questions in this unit almost always describe a stable score that fails to predict the outcome, and the required answer is reliable but not valid.
- Describing functional fixedness whenever any fixation appears. Functional fixedness is specifically about seeing an object only in its usual role. Persisting with a strategy that used to work is mental set. Use the general term fixation only when neither specific term fits.
Practice it
Reading the method is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure. This set drills 18 cards one at a time and schedules each card separately, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner.