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Pachur et al 2012, table 1
24 types of cancer
Three measures of risk:
perceived frequency (which cause of death has a higher annual mortality rate?)
Value of a Statistical Life, VSL (how much money should be spent to avoid one fatality due to this cause of death?)
perceived risk (which cause of death represents a higher risk of dying from it?)
Inaccessible properties:
- frequency
- risk of dying from it
Accessible properties:
- how easily can I bring to mind a case of this?
- how does imagining it makes me feel?
Two heuristics
Availability Heuristic
The easier it is to bring a case of this cancer to mind, the more frequent or risky it is.
Is this really a heuristic?
Affect Heuristic
The more dread you feel when imagining it, the more frequent or risky it is.
Is this really a heuristic?
Hypothesis:
The Availablity Heuristic dominates frequency judgements ,
whereas the Affect Heuristic dominates risk and VSL judgements.
Prediction:
Number of cases in a subject’s social network will better predict frequency judgements,
whereas feelings of dread will better predict risk and VSL judgements.
Findings:
both predictions broadly confirmed.
Pachur et al, 2012
Pachur et al, 2012 table 1
Summary
The Affect Heuristic:
The more dread you feel when imagining it, the more frequent or risky it is.
In general, heuristics
involve subsituting inaccessible for accessible properties;
and hypotheses about them generate testable predictions.
To find evidence for the operation of a heuristic, test a prediction about the correlates or causes of judgements.
How is this relevant?
1
Humans use an affect heuristic in some cases;
so the idea they use it in making unreflective ethical judgements
is at least worth considering.
2
We can use Pachur et al (2012) as a model
for what would count as evidence
that humans use an affect heuristic
in making unreflective ethical judgements ...
What do adult humans compute that enables their unreflective judgements to track frequency, VSL and risk?
What do adult humans compute that enables their unreflective judgements to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
affect (and availability) heuristics
Evidence
Affect and availability predict risk and frequency judgements, respectively
Evidence
???