A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome. Our.
Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.
A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The hope.
However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.
Especially when the original critique is sharply worded, the reply and the rejoinder are often exercises in what I have called sarcasm for beginners and advanced sarcasm.
Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.
More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive – incorrect – answer.
The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.
Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.
They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.
Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees.
Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.
The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it.
All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.
It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.
Overconfidence is another manifestation of WYSIATI: when we estimate a quantity, we rely on information that comes to mind and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind – perhaps because one never knew it – is impossible.
Earlier I traced people’s confidence in a belief to two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true.
The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
Of course, we and our animal cousins are quickly alerted to signs of opportunities to mate or to feed, and advertisers design billboards accordingly.
Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.