When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favorably than he deserves.
Close your eyes.
And here, the effects are not those you might imagine. Being in a good mood is a mixed blessing, and bad moods have a silver lining. The costs and benefits of different moods are situation-specific.
In the standard rational model of economics, people take risks because the odds are favorable – they accept some probability of a costly failure because the probability of success is sufficient.
The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.” “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” “Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.
As you can guess, this is a test of the readers’ vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.
However, when the subjects were placed in a positive mood – induced by watching a five-minute video segment – they became three times more likely to say that they would push the man off the bridge. Whether we regard “Thou shalt not kill” as an absolute principle or are willing to kill one stranger to save five should reflect our deepest values. Yet our choice seems to depend on what video clip we have just watched.
Mental arithmetic is a voluntary activity that requires effort, should not be performed while making a left turn, and is associated with dilated pupils and an accelerated heart rate.
A study of nearly seven hundred thousand primary care visits, for instance, showed that physicians are significantly more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day.
Other studies showed that, toward the end of the day, physicians are more likely to prescribe antibiotics and less likely to prescribe flu shots.
Bad weather is associated with improved memory; judicial sentences tend to be more severe when it is hot outside; and stock market performance is affected by sunshine.
The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered – hence the image of an anchor.
Uri Simonsohn showed that college admissions officers pay more attention to the academic attributes of candidates on cloudier days and are more sensitive to nonacademic attributes on sunnier days. The title of the article in which he reported these findings is memorable enough: “Clouds Make Nerds Look Good.
Amos and I enjoyed the extraordinary good fortune of a shared mind that was superior to our individual minds and of a relationship that made our work fun as well as productive.
How large is occasion noise relative to total system noise?
I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.
As noted, for instance, the chance that an asylum applicant will be admitted in the United States drops by 19% if the hearing follows two successful ones by the same judge. This variability is certainly troubling. But it pales in comparison with the variability between judges: in one Miami courthouse, Jaya Ramji-Nogales and her co-authors found that one judge would grant asylum to 88% of applicants and another to only 5%.
Similarly, fingerprint examiners and physicians sometimes disagree with themselves, but they do so less often than they disagree with others. In every case we reviewed in which the share of occasion noise in total system noise could be measured, occasion noise was a smaller contributor than were differences among individuals.
Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others.
It is very likely that intrinsic variability in the functioning of the brain also affects the quality of our judgments in ways that we cannot possibly hope to control.