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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations.
In a 1994 study, 37 psychology students were asked to estimate how long it would take to finish their senior theses.The average estimate was 33.9 days. They also estimated how long it would take "if everything went as well as it possibly could" (averaging 27.4 days) and "if everything went as poorly as it possibly could" (averaging 48.6 days).
Heuristics (from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω, heurískō, "I find, discover") is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, [1] [2] [3] organizations, [4] and even machines [5] use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems.
The availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be. [20] The availability heuristic includes or involves the following:
Under this framework, heuristics are ecologically rational, meaning a heuristic may be successful if the way it works matches the demands of the environment it is being used in. Researchers in this vein also argue that heuristics may be just as or even more accurate when compared to more complex strategies, such as multiple regression. [10]
The metaphor of cognitive misers could assist people in drawing lessons from risks, which is the possibility that an undesirable state of reality may occur. [32] People apply a number of shortcuts or heuristics in making judgements about the likelihood of an event, because the rapid answers provided by heuristics are often right.
Not all moral systems appeal to a human telos or purpose. This is because it is not obvious that people even have any sort of natural purpose, or what that purpose would be. Although many scientists do recognize teleonomy (a tendency in nature), few philosophers appeal to it (this time, to avoid the naturalistic fallacy).
The proportionality bias, also known as major event/major cause heuristic, is the tendency to assume that big events have big causes.It is a type of cognitive bias and plays an important role in people's tendency to accept conspiracy theories.