Letters Remain

Tag: decision-making

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Overestimating the Paradox of Choice

    Are we overestimating the reach of the ‘too-much-choice effect’—the phenomenon first noted by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) [pdf] and popularised by Barry Schwartz as the paradox of choice? The theory states that, contrary to traditional economic principles, the more choice consumers have the less satisfied and less likely to decide they are. However, this from the…

  • How We Decide

    One of my favourite science writers—the editor at large of Seed Magazine, Jonah Lehrer—has been interviewed by The Commonwealth Club about his forthcoming book, The Decisive Moment/How We Decide (UK/US titles, respectively). The video of the interview is full of excellent anecdotes (backed-up by peer reviewed research) on many topics ranging from emotional and rational…