Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.
The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it. Editors cannot ignore the public’s demands that certain topics and viewpoints receive extensive coverage. Unusual.
Another way of saying this is that controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.
The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words happened by a process called associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The.
Todorov has found that people judge competence by combining the two dimensions of strength and trustworthiness.
The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.
Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.
The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.
The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news.
Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People.
SPEAKING OF PRIMING “The sight of all these people in uniforms does not prime creativity.” “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.” “They were primed to find flaws, and this is exactly what they found.” “His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.” “I made myself smile and I’m actually feeling better!
Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better.
As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television.
The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight – nothing in between.
Italy and France competed in the 2006 final of the World Cup. The next two sentences both describe the outcome: “Italy won.” “France lost.” Do those statements have the same meaning? The answer depends entirely on what you mean by meaning.
Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.
But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “unknown unknowns.
Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.
Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.
It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding.