Tag: cognitive-bias
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Validation vs Correctness
In order to avoid cognitive dissonance you have a number of choices. Primarily: selective exposure and/or confirmation bias. Researchers from a number of US universities are now attempting to quantify these phenomena, looking at how we seek validation as opposed to correctness. The researchers found that people are about twice as likely to select information that supports their…
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Economic Experts: Insightful, Biased
Be wary of advice and forecasts from economic ‘experts’, says economist Zachary Karabell—not because they are trying to sell their services or because they are lying, but because they truly believe their (unintentionally) skewed opinions. Being wrong in the past is not much of a liability as long as one is right in the present.…
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The Perils of Pop Psychology
In response to Jane O’Grady’s Open Democracy article critiquing the ‘neuro-social-sciences’, Julian Sanchez outlines his thoughts on the perils of pop psychology: There are arguments that simply can’t be made in the span of even a longish newspaper or magazine article. If one is writing for a lay audience, in fact, I feel pretty confident that…
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Testing Rationality and Bias
How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such…
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Predicting Our Future Reactions
Written by, among others, Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), an article in Science looks at how bad we are at judging our reactions to various future events (closed access article). In two experiments, participants more accurately predicted their affective reactions to a future event when they knew how a neighbor in their social…
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CIA Guide to Optimised Thinking
Complex situations are – by their very nature – difficult to understand. Compound this with the fact that in any given situation we’re all going to have cognitive biases that make us view situations differently and inaccurately, and you’re going to have a bit of a mess when it comes to thinking about and analysing…