Reading Reflection on "What every baby knows"

1.) Inferential learning mechanisms are the learning tools that baby's are believed to be born with. They allow the baby to have initial "theories" about the world it has been brought into, and they allow them to change and rework those theories based on experience. Additionally, these inferential learning mechanisms give the baby the learning capacity necessary to build upon its theories.

2.) According to this article, as a child gets older, it has many changes made to these inferential learning mechanisms. When a baby is just born, it is able to recognize and imitate facial expressions, even though it can't recognize its own face in a mirror. It even begins to recognize and prefer voices. One-year-olds have the ability to understand peoples' actions and emotions; they see how other people react and feel about things and believe that they should feel similarly. They also see how others handle and interact with certain objects, and know that they should do the same. 14-month-olds don't have the ability, however, to understand that people may desire different things, like 18-month-olds can. So even with a 4 month difference there is a still a huge gap in mental development. Although, children don't have the ability to understand that people can believe different things until about 4 years old, which is when they actually begin to understand their own mind and the minds of others. All of this is different in the case of children with autism, as their learning progression is significantly stunted.

3.) There is a quote from the article that basically sums it up, "Babies are like little scientists continually overthrowing theories that no longer fit the evidence." Their theories about the world that stem from their inferential learning mechanisms are like scientific theories: they are changed and rewritten as more about the world is learned and experienced. They analyze the world as scientists do, and by changing and rewriting their own theories they become more intelligent about the world as time passes. Psychologists have learned an unbelievable amount about babies in these past 30 years, and we've learned that they're smarter than we think.

Intuition & Knowledge

What is meant by "reading thin slices"?

What this means is that when people perceive just a small amount of something, quickly, such as a picture of a face briefly flashed on a screen, they automatically "read" it and gain some sort of interpretation or judgement about it. 

Explain intuitive expertise.

Intuitive expertise is when someone who has been doing something for a long time and could be considered an expert at it, retains a sort of subconscious expertise in the same area that allows them  to be able to do things intuitively, just because of their experience with it. For example, cooks now how much of certain ingredients to put in their meals without measuring it-they just know intuitively what will result in a better meal, but they can't explain how they know exactly to people outside of their area of expertise.

What are the perils of relying on intuition?

The perils of relying on intuition are overconfidence and fear of the wrong things. When people rely on their intuition, but end up incorrect, they tend to say that their intuitive answer was "close" and it was reasonable enough to  not be considered exactly wrong. This is an example of overconfidence due to reliance on intuition-people feel they were right because it's what they initially felt. Fear of the wrong things includes fearing what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear, fearing what we cannot control, fearing what is immediate, and fearing threats most readily available in memory. Most of these fears are illogical, and take over our minds instead of the other things that actually pose a danger to us, but we fear them because of intuition. For example, people in the US are more scared to fly on planes because of 9/11, yet they aren't afraid of driving when car accidents have a much, much higher death rate than airplanes. 

Is intuition a fair justification for mistakes made in decision-making? Give reasons and examples to support your answer. 

I think in some cases, intuition could be a fair justification for mistakes made in decision-making, but definitely not in all. I think every person should try to combat their intuition with logic in order to avoid making these kinds of mistakes. For example, in the Diallo case, the cops made a rational decision based off of what they were seeing and their training (though 41 shots seems excessive). But in the case of  the 8 year old boy not being able to fly since he was a baby because of his name, people should have logically realized that this 8 year old boy was of no threat to them, and was just a victim of his name. Their intuitive fear of someone with the same name as a terrorist getting on their plane should have been eradicated once they analytically and logically looked at the actual situation.