We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.
The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.
For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is – a hopeless mirage.
Organizations face the challenge of controlling the tendency of executives competing for resources to present overly optimistic plans. A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated – the unknown unknowns.
Amos and I called our first joint article “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers.” We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that “intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well.” We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their “statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible.
We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla “invisible” by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.
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.
It is difficult to reconstruct what it was that took us years, long hours of discussion, endless exchanges of drafts and hundreds of e-mails negotiating over words, and more than once almost giving up. But this is what always happens when a project ends reasonably well: once you understand the main conclusion, it seems it was always obvious.
In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.
Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm.
The answer was straightforward: instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large. We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by “the ease with which instances come to mind.
And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts – although they may have valuable insights into the near future. The.
The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.
Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error.
System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true.
Unless you are a professional, however, you may not react very differently to a sample of 150 and to a sample of 3,000. That is the meaning of the statement that “people are not adequately sensitive to sample size.
Adam switches from a gas-guzzler of 12 mpg to a slightly less voracious guzzler that runs at 14 mpg. The environmentally virtuous Beth switches from a 30 mpg car to one that runs at 40 mpg.
In contrast, Meehl and other proponents of algorithms have argued strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes.
Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The.
We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.