If you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around.
Variability in judgments is also expected and welcome in a competitive situation in which the best judgments will be rewarded.
The same is true when multiple teams of researchers attack a scientific problem, such as the development of a vaccine: we very much want them to look at it from different angles.
But our focus is on judgments in which variability is undesirable. System noise is a problem of systems, which are organizations, not markets.
Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.
The stubbornness of an intelligent person is seen as likely to be justified and may actually evoke respect, but intelligence in an envious and stubborn person makes him more dangerous.
For the insurance company, the illusion of agreement was shattered only by the noise audit. How had the leaders of the company remained unaware of their noise problem? There are several possible answers here, but one that seems to play a large role in many settings is simply the discomfort of disagreement.
Level noise is when judges show different levels of severity. Pattern noise is when they disagree with one another on which defendants deserve more severe or more lenient treatment. And part of pattern noise is occasion noise – when judges disagree with themselves.
Level noise is variability in the average level of judgments by different judges. Pattern noise is variability in judges’ responses to particular cases.
Differences between experts and the public are explained in part by biases in lay judgments, but Slovic draws attention to situations in which the differences reflect a genuine conflict of values.
Highly skilled people are less noisy, and they also show less bias.
To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.
When predictability is poor – which it is in most of the studies reviewed by Meehl and his followers – inconsistency is destructive of any predictive validity.
In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.
Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.
We hold a single interpretation of the world around us at any one time, and we normally invest little effort in generating plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough, and we experience it as true. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways of seeing what we see.
Atul Gawande’s recent A Checklist Manifesto.
The observation that “90% of drivers believe they are better than average” is a well-established psychological finding that has become part of the culture, and it often comes up as a prime example of a more general above-average effect.
Some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis. If you choose to delude yourself by accepting extreme predictions... you will do well to remain aware of your self-indulgence.
Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, published the first scientific paper suggesting the use of fingerprints as an identification technique.