Rationality
Emotion
Morality
Reinforcement Learning
Cross-Cutting Concepts
100

This researcher would claim that humans are rarely rational, and that instead they rely on a set of heuristics

Who is Kahneman?

100

This is the functional problem of emotions

What is mapping from situations to feelings, bodily response patterns, facial expressions?

100

ALL ABOARD! It's this kind of problem, one used to determine intuitions about moral judgment. Includes the bystander and footbridge conditions.

What is the trolley problem?

100

This is a prediction about the future cumulative expected reward that will come about if you start in a particular state, take a particular action, and behave optimally thereafter

What is a Q-value?

100

Like Universal Grammar, this system is a tacit, abstract, and innate framework that helps explain how we generate rich moral judgments despite limited input.

What is universal moral grammar?

200

Kahneman proposes that there are two systems at work in rational decision making. This one is quick and effortless.

What is Intuition and reasoning?

OR

What is System 1 thinking?

200

Describe a “con” of the James-Lange Theory

What is:

  • The bodily response profile can’t always explain what makes emotions feel different from “cold” beliefs

  • The bodily response profile can’t explain what makes one emotion different than another

200

Josh Greene proposes that personal force moral dilemmas trigger these, which are not present in impersonal moral dilemmas

What are “alarm bell” emotions

200

If the discount factor (γ) is set to a smaller value, what does this imply about the agent’s behavior?

What is the agent prioritizes immediate rewards and becomes more short-sighted (less focused on long-term rewards)?

200

The fact that emotions can be explained as structured, rule-based, algorithmic processes in affect systems supports this idea about how the mind works.

What is that all mentation is computation?




300

Buying stock in a company just because you “just like it” is an example of this heuristic, which argues that judgements are made on the basis of gut feelings

What is the affect heuristic?

300

In the flimsy bridge study, subjects misattributed their bodily response to the confederate at the end of the bridge and not the flimsiness of the bridge suggesting that this happens after the bodily response pattern.

What is Conscious Interpretation of Bodily Response Pattern?

300

According to Greene, this accounts for what seems to be triggering emotional responses in participants when confronted with a personal moral dilemma

What is personal force?

300

This aspect of RL is calculated as the difference between [R(s) + Q(s', a')] and Q(s,a)

What is the prediction error?

300

One can consciously know that airplanes are a very safe form of transportation, and yet still have a strong fear of flying. This phenomenon demonstrates this characteristic feature of modularity within the fear module.

What is informational encapsulation? (Our fear module does not have access to our conscious, central cognition that knows that flying is safe.)

400

Evolutionary psychologists argue that modular reasoning systems "work" in the case of beer drinking examples and not in the case of X3M7 examples because of this characteristic of modular systems.

What is domain specificity?

400

This brain structure is the first stop on both the high road and low road of emotion processing

What is the thalamus?

Low Road = Thalamus --> Amygdala

High Road = Thalamus --> Sensory Cortex --> Amygdala 


400

It is this principle, which claims that it is permissible to cause a foreseen but unintended harm as a side effect in bringing about a good end rather than causing that harm as a means to bringing about the same good end

What is doctrine of double effect?

400

This area is argued to be where Q values are maintained. Participants with damage to this area make poor choices in the Iowa Gambling task.

What is ventral medial prefrontal cortex?

400

We discussed many example of dual process systems in this course, name two of them. 

What is... 

1. Kahneman's System 1 & 2 thinking

2. LeDoux's Low Road/High Road Fear Processing

3. Cosmides & Tooby's Cheater Detection Hypothesis

4. Intact Cortical Visual Processing

500

How can we adjust the Linda Bank teller problem to make people more likely to select the “rationally correct” answer?

Present the problem in terms of frequencies

500

Standard Appraisal Theory, put forward by Magda Arnold, argues that Conscious Interpretation of the Situation takes place before this, which other theories before hers assumed happened immediately after being exposed to a stimulus

What is the bodily response pattern

500

To make utilitarian judgements in moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem:

A. You must engage in additional emotional processing

B. You must override the initial emotional response

C. You must override the initial calculation of lives saved

B. You must override the initial emotional response

500

Which statement is correct?

A. The subjective value of an outcome is the utility of an outcome

B. The expected objective value of an outcome is the objective value of the outcome x the probability of the outcome occurring

c. All of the above

c. All of the above

500

Name and describe 2 examples of fast, automatic systems that produce irrational or untrustworthy outputs that we've discussed in this course. 

1. System 1 Thinking (fast & automatic)


2. LeDoux's Low Road (skips higher cognitive processing)

3. Greene's "Alarm Bell" Emotional Response System 

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