Studying at the University of Verona
Here you can find information on the organisational aspects of the Programme, lecture timetables, learning activities and useful contact details for your time at the University, from enrolment to graduation.
Study Plan
This information is intended exclusively for students already enrolled in this course.If you are a new student interested in enrolling, you can find information about the course of study on the course page:
Laurea magistrale in Psicologia per la formazione - Enrollment from 2025/2026The Study Plan includes all modules, teaching and learning activities that each student will need to undertake during their time at the University.
Please select your Study Plan based on your enrollment year.
1° Year
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2° Year activated in the A.Y. 2021/2022
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Legend | Type of training activity (TTA)
TAF (Type of Educational Activity) All courses and activities are classified into different types of educational activities, indicated by a letter.
Thinking and Reasoning (2021/2022)
Teaching code
4S007368
Teacher
Coordinator
Credits
6
Language
Italian
Scientific Disciplinary Sector (SSD)
M-PSI/01 - GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY
Period
Sem. 2A dal Feb 14, 2022 al Mar 26, 2022.
Learning outcomes
This course will cover the main contemporary theories of human thinking and reasoning, including perceptual processes, logical and analogical reasoning, and probabilistic reasoning. In addition, it will cover classic research on problem solving and decision making, the mental model theory, as well as heuristics and biases in judgement. By the end of the course students will be able to: - understand the historical framework, in which theories and experimental researches concerning psychology of thinking and reasoning has been developed, also developing a deep comprehension of the psychological constructs in the field, - develop knowledge and comprehension of the terms relating to Decision Making and Problem Solving.
Program
- Automatic mind vs serial mind
- System 1 vs System 2
- Interactions between system 1 and system 2
- Interactions: seeing vs knowing
- Interactions: the search for a compromise
- Cognitive effort and mental laziness
- Cognitive effort and mydriasis
- More on cognitive effort
- Optimal cognitive effort
- Cognitive effort and self-control
- The depletion of the self
- Depletion of the ego and blood glucose
- The lazy system 2
- Relationship between intelligence, control and rationality
- The associative mechanism (of system 1)
- The priming effect
- The ideomotor priming effect
- The reversed ideomotor priming effect
- Priming and stimuli
- The Lady Macbeth effect
- Cognitive fluency
- Cognitive fluidity, memory illusions and déjà vu
- Illusions of truth
- How to be persuasive
- Tension and cognitive effort
- The pleasure of cognitive fluency
- The exposure effect
- Creativity, fluency, mood and intuition
- Surprise and normality
- Communication and normality
- Causality and intention
- Jump to intuitive conclusions and mistakes
- Jump to conclusions, context and recency
- Belief bias
- Confirmation bias
- Bias "halo effect"
- WYSIATI: What You See Is All There Is
- WYSIATI and judgment and choice bias
- How are judgments formed?
- Basic evaluations (series and prototypes)
- Intensity matching
- The "mental smack"
- Heuristic substitution of questions
- 3D heuristics
- Heuristics of mood and happiness
- Heuristics of affection
- The difficult relationship between the mind and statistics
- Variability
- The law of small numbers
- The bias of certainty with respect to doubt
- Cause and case
- Cause, case and cognitive illusions
- Anchoring effect
- Anchoring effect as adjustment and as priming
- The anchor index
- Reasonableness / randomness of the anchor
- Anchoring and arbitrary rationing
- Anchoring and threats
- Estimate the frequency of a category
- Availability heuristics
- Availability heuristics, emotion and risk
- Audience vs experts
- Cascade of availability
- The risk assessment
- The evaluation of probability
- A priori probability and heuristics of representativeness
- The ambiguities of the heuristic of representativeness
- Representativeness heuristics and system 2
- Disciplining intuition to Bayesian logic
- Heuristics vs logic: less is more
- Fallacy of the conjunction
- Persuasive vs probable
- Single evaluation vs joint evaluation
- Probability, money and joint evaluation
- Probability vs frequency
- The causes beat the statistics
- Random stereotypes
- Statistical and random a priori probabilities
- Do you teach more "from general to particular" or "from particular to general"?
- Regression towards the average
- Understanding regression
- Regressive considerations
- Correct intuitive predictions
- Non-regressive intuitions
- A test for the correction of intuitive predictions
- Excessive security: the illusion of understanding
- The hindsight and past states of knowledge
- The hindsight bias and the result bias
- The recipes of success and halo effect
- The illusion of validity
- The illusion of skill
- The illusion of the gurus
- Insights against formulas
- Multiple vs unweighted regression
- Hostility (of clinicians) towards algorithms
- The man-machine moral issue
- How to make good predictions: build a simple algorithm
- Expert intuition, intuition as recognition
- Acquire competence
- Doubts about expert intuition
- Expert intuition vs algorithms
- Regularities easily or hardly discovered: the role of feedback
- Evaluate the validity of an intuition
- Internal vs external vision
- The fallacy of planning
- The optimistic bias
- Excessive security
- The positivity of optimism
- The "pre-mortem" method
- Choices and theories
- The theory of utility learned
- The position of Bernoulli
- The theory of the prospect
- Bernoulli's mistake
- Aversion to loss
- The blind spots of prospect theory
- The reference point
- Dotation effect
- Negative events
- The asymmetric intensity of the motivations
- Subjective reference and aversion to loss
- Weights and probabilities
- Change the odds
- Possibility effect and certainty effect
- We are willing to pay for uncertainty
- Decision-making weights
- The 4-cell scheme
- Rare events
- Overestimation and overweight
- Vibrance of representation
- Carelessness for the denominator
- The power of the format
- Framing
- The tilt effect
- Inclination and fallacy effect of sunk costs
- The regret
- Blame
- Emotions, regret and guilt
- The importance of contrasting alternatives
- The inversions of preference
- Categories of judgment and intensity matching
- Framing effect
- Good and bad frames
- Experience and memory
- Happy ending and coincidences
- Well-being
Bibliography
Examination Methods
NB:
As a result of the health emergency due to Covid-19, the usual examination modalities might be modified, in accordance with the University indications. Updates will be posted on the course moodle e-learning page.
The exam will consist of a written test with 30 multiple choice questions in 30 minutes (3 alternative answers of which only one is correct. For the purposes of the final judgment expressed out of thirty, a correct answer has a value equal to 1 point, one wrong answer has a value of 0 points, an answer not given has a value of 0 points).
