Chapter 15: Quiz
1. Which cognitive bias has the strongest replication evidence?
- A) Social priming (elderly words → slow walking)
- B) Ego depletion (willpower as limited resource)
- C) Confirmation bias (seeking information that confirms existing beliefs)
- D) Power posing (expansive posture → hormonal changes)
Answer: C. Confirmation bias is one of the most robust findings in all of psychology, replicating consistently across studies and contexts. Social priming, ego depletion, and power posing have all failed or substantially weakened in replication.
2. The "elderly priming" study (Bargh et al., 1996) claimed that:
- A) Old people walk faster when primed with young-related words
- B) Exposure to words related to old age made young people walk more slowly
- C) Elderly people are more susceptible to priming
- D) Walking speed is unrelated to cognitive processes
Answer: B. The study claimed that priming with elderly-related words made young participants walk more slowly. Multiple replication attempts failed to confirm the effect, and one study (Doyen et al., 2012) found the effect only appeared when experimenters expected it.
3. Gigerenzer's ecological rationality perspective argues that:
- A) All cognitive biases are errors that need correcting
- B) Many "biases" are adaptive heuristics that work well in typical environments but look like errors in artificial lab conditions
- C) Humans are more rational than Kahneman claimed because biases don't exist
- D) Only formal logic produces good decisions
Answer: B. Gigerenzer argues that heuristics evolved because they work in real-world environments. Calling them "biases" reflects judging natural cognition against the inappropriate standard of formal probability theory.
4. Loss aversion means:
- A) People prefer to avoid all risk
- B) People feel losses approximately 1.5–2.5x as strongly as equivalent gains
- C) People never notice gains
- D) Losses don't affect decision-making
Answer: B. Loss aversion is the asymmetry between the psychological impact of gains and losses. A $100 loss feels roughly 1.5–2.5x worse than a $100 gain feels good.
5. Research on debiasing shows that:
- A) Simply knowing about a bias eliminates it
- B) Awareness of biases has limited debiasing effect; structural interventions are more effective
- C) Biases can be eliminated permanently through one training session
- D) Only IQ determines susceptibility to biases
Answer: B. Knowledge alone has limited effect. More effective interventions include changing choice architecture, implementing checklists, and requiring group deliberation before decisions.
6. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been criticized because:
- A) It measures explicit rather than implicit attitudes
- B) It has poor test-retest reliability and weak predictive validity for actual discriminatory behavior (r ≈ 0.10–0.15)
- C) It's too expensive to administer
- D) It was never peer-reviewed
Answer: B. The IAT's psychometric limitations — poor reliability and weak behavioral prediction — undermine its use as a diagnostic tool in corporate training, despite its widespread adoption.
7. The "System 1 and System 2" framework proposed by Kahneman describes:
- A) Two separate brain regions
- B) Two types of processing: fast/automatic/intuitive (System 1) and slow/deliberate/analytical (System 2)
- C) Two personality types
- D) Two phases of sleep
Answer: B. System 1 and System 2 are metaphors for two modes of cognitive processing. Kahneman notes they are not distinct brain systems but useful descriptions of different processing styles.
8. Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky) is:
- A) Failed to replicate and is now debunked
- B) Well-replicated and earned Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics
- C) Only applicable to gambling decisions
- D) A theory about personality types
Answer: B. Prospect theory — which describes how people evaluate outcomes relative to reference points and are loss-averse — is one of the most well-replicated contributions from the heuristics and biases program.
9. The pop culture narrative about cognitive biases is best described as:
- A) A perfectly accurate representation of the research
- B) An oversimplification that treats adaptive heuristics as universal errors and overgeneralizes from some findings (including those that haven't replicated)
- C) Completely wrong — biases don't exist
- D) Only relevant to psychologists
Answer: B. The popular "humans are hopelessly irrational" narrative oversimplifies the research by ignoring ecological rationality, overgeneralizing laboratory findings, and not accounting for the replication crisis.
10. The chapter's overall message is:
- A) Cognitive biases are fake
- B) Kahneman was always wrong
- C) Biases are real but the pop version oversimplifies — some findings haven't replicated, many "biases" are adaptive, and awareness alone doesn't fix them
- D) We should ignore all cognitive bias research
Answer: C. The chapter validates the core heuristics-and-biases research while identifying three key oversimplifications in the popular narrative: failed replications, the adaptive heuristics perspective, and the limited effectiveness of awareness-based debiasing.