社会信念和判断

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

With precious little time to process so much imformation, our cognitive system is fast and frugal. It specializes in mental shortcuts. WIth remarkable ease, we form impressions, make judgment, invent explanations. We do so by using heuristics —— simple， efficient thinking strategies.  Heuristic enable us to live and make routine decisions with mininal effort (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2008). In most situations, our snap generalizations —— "That's dangerous!" —— are adaptive. The speed of these intuitive guides promotes our survival. The biological purpose of thinking is less to make us right than to keep us alive. In some situations, however, haste makes error.

需要极少时间里处理大量信息的背景下，我们的认知系统快捷且节约。它专于心理捷径。我们非常轻松容易地形成印象、做出判断、编造解释。我们通过启发式来实现，它是简单、高效的思考策略。启发式使得我们生活和日常做决定时付出最小化。 在绝大部分情况下，我们快速的概括，比如“这很危险” 通常是符合情况的。这些直觉指导的速度促进了我们生存。从生物学上的目的角度看，思考为了我们的生存大于是我们正确。然而，在一些情况下，仓促也会犯错。

heuristics:  n.启发式，这是心理学上的专业词汇。二十世纪五十年代，心理学家赫伯特·西蒙（Herbert Simon）提出了“有限理性”的概念，指出人类的理性受限于认知资源的限制。为了应对这种限制，人类发展出了启发式这种高效的认知结构。

frugal: adj. 节俭的  she lives a frugal life.

With precious little time 是with引导的介词短语做状语，描述了主句“our cognitive system is fast and frugal”的背景条件，翻译为 "在....背景下，鉴于..."。

With remarkable ease，介词“with”经常用于这种目的，以连接描述性的短语或从句，为句子的其他部分提供背景或条件信息。

THE REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC

代表性启发式

University of Oregon students were told that a panel of psychologists interviewed a sample of 30 engineers and 70 lawyers and summarized their impressions in thumbnail descriptions. The following description, they were told, was drawn at random from the sample of 30 engineers and 70 lawyers:

俄勒冈大学的学生被告知一个心理学专家组采访了一个由30个工程师和70个律师组成的样本，并把对他们的印象写成缩略描述。学生们被告知的描述是随机抽取的。

Twice divorced, Frank spends most of his free time hanging around the country club. His clubhouse bar conversations often center on his regrets at having tried to follow his esteemed father's footsteps. The long hours he had spent at academic drudgery would have been better invested in learning how to be less quarrelsome in his relations with other people.

弗兰克把大量空闲时间消磨于在城市酒吧，他离婚两次。他在酒吧的话题经常是关于他后悔追随受人尊敬的父亲的脚步。他在学生时代投入很多时间投资自己去学习与他人避免争吵。

Question: What is the probability that Frank is a lawyer rather than an engineer?

Asked to guess Frank's occupation, more than 80 percent of the students surmised he was one of the lawyers (Fischhoff & Bar-Hillel, 1984). Fair enough. But how do yo