Heuristic Principles
In Activity #1A, I had to determine if Linda was a bank teller or a feminist bank teller based on a number of items used to describe her. I used the cancellation principle (Plous, 1993, p. 81) to rule out "bank teller" as a possibility since I did not have enough information to make that determination. This left alternative B. By using representativeness heuristics (Watson, A. et al, 1998), I framed an opinion that someone active in the feminist movement could very well have a similar background to Linda. My rationale fell prey to conjunction fallacy, in that it is less probable that Linda is both a bank teller and a feminist than just a bank teller or just a feminist (Hertwig & Gigerenzer, 1999, p. 275).
Using representative heuristics again in Activity #1B, I chose the third option, no preference. I figured there still was a 50/50 chance that the unbiased coin would land on either heads or tails. Anyone that chose Heads would have been a victim to "the hot hand," in that they were predicting a continuation of the random sequence of coin tosses to land on Heads. Anyone that chose Tails would have been a victim of "gambler's fallacy," in that they were predicting a reversal of the random sequence of coin tosses to land on Tails (Hertwig & Gigerenzer, 1999, p. 275).
In Activity #2A, I chose the second option. Its sequence looked a bit more random than the first option. People that chose the first options were victims of "the hot hand" or "gambler's fallacy" (Hertwig & Gigernezer, 1999, p. 275).
In Girl Scouts I learned that a piece of paper is virtually impossible to fold more than 8 times due to its thickness and number of layers (128) of that folded-up piece of paper. When Activity #2B asked how thick I thought a piece of p ...