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The intuition that positive instances are somehow more informative than disconfirmations can also be seen in the quotation by Holt
Their difficulty in recognizing the relevance of the latter response is no doubt due to the extra cognitive step that is required to put it to use—a statement that the number is not between 5,000 and 10,000 must be converted to a mental representation that it is between 1 and 5,000.
Although a tendency to ask such one-sided questions does not guarantee that the hypothesis will be confirmed, it can produce an erroneous sense of confirmation for a couple of reasons. First, the specific questions asked can sometimes be so constraining that only information consistent with the hypothesis is likely to be elicited.
The accepted interpretation of these results is that judgments of similarity are primarily determined by features that two entities share.
Judgments of dissimilarity, on the other hand, are primarily determined by features that are not shared by the two entities—i.e., by those features that are distinctive to one or the other. Again, because people know more about East and West Germany than Sri Lanka and Nepal, it is easier to think of ways in which they differ from one another, and so they are seen as more dissimilar as well.
The important point here is that many times we cannot carry out such a comparison even if we appreciate how important such a comparison is. Those who do not score high enough on the selection criterion are not allowed to perform, and so we cannot determine how many of them would have succeeded.
if there would have been a large number of successes even among those who fell below the cutoff on the selection criteria—one can erroneously conclude that the selection criterion is effective even if it is completely unrelated to performance.
Another factor that can make a selection criterion appear spuriously effective is that the mere fact of being in the “accepted” group can give a person a competitive advantage over those who were rejected. Some of those who receive research grants go on to have more productive careers than some who were less fortunate, not because their research ideas were any better, but because the grant enabled them to examine their ideas more thoroughly. Some of the students who score well enough on the SAT to be admitted to a prestigious college go on to become professionally successful men and women
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The scheme depicted in Figures 3.1 and 3.2 is really quite general, and applies not only to the evaluation of selection criteria, but to the assessment of policy more generally. A fundamental difficulty with effective policy evaluation is that we rarely get to observe what would have happened if the policy had not been put into effect. Policies are not implemented as controlled experiments, but as concerted actions.
Randomised controlled trials have been suggested to the British Government by Ben Goldacre and colleagues.
Students with high SAT scores are indeed more likely to do well in college than those with low SAT scores. By looking only at the restricted data from schools with the usual patterns of enrollment, many people have failed to recognize the true effectiveness of the SAT (in terms of making gross discriminations between applicants). The problem of absent data has thus served to misdirect much of the discussion of whether to use the SAT in admissions decisions.*
We can occasionally overcome our limited exposure to relevant data, but doing so is difficult: It requires that we not only recognize the existence of a class of information to which we have not been exposed, but that we accurately characterize what that information is like.
There is a special version of the hidden data problem that arises whenever our expectations lead us to act in ways that fundamentally change the world that we observe. When this happens, we often accept what we observe at face value, with little consideration of how things might have been different if we had acted differently. Sociologist Robert Merton used the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” to describe this phenomenon, and he gave the example of how a false rumor of a bank’s insolvency can generate a panic that creates the very insolvency that was initially feared.16
Thus, because competitive behavior creates more of a demand for the other person to respond in kind than does cooperation, a competitive person’s belief that the world is full of selfish opportunists will almost always be confirmed, whereas the less gloomy orientation of cooperative individuals will not. Sadly, negative prophecies are often more readily fulfilled.
Thus, self-fulfilling prophecies generally turn little effects into big effects, rather than create effects from scratch.
A final point to be made about self-fulfilling prophecies is that there are really two kinds—true self-fulfilling prophecies and seemingly-fulfilled prophecies. True self-fulfilling prophecies are like those already discussed in which a person’s expectation elicits the very behavior that was originally anticipated.
Seemingly-fulfilled prophecies, on the other hand, refer to expectations that alter another person’s world, or limit another’s responses, in such a way that it is difficult or impossible for the expectations to be disconfirmed. Thus, the expectancy is confirmed, not by the target person actively conforming to some expectancy, but by the target having little opportunity to disconfirm it. If someone thinks that I am unfriendly, for example, I might have little chance to correct that misconception because he or she may steer clear of me.
The existence of seemingly-fulfilled prophecies implies that negative first impressions should generally be more stable (i.e., less subject to change) than positive first impressions. If we find another person unpleasant initially, we try to avoid that person as much as possible, and he or she will have a difficult time disabusing us of our negative assessment. If we like another person, on the other hand, we seek out his or her company and thereby give him or her ample opportunity to ruin our hopes and expectations.20 This can sound rather grim, but it does have a positive flip-side: It
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I’ll see it when I believe it.
Trade-offs are apparent in everyday judgment and reasoning as well. When making judgments and decisions, we employ a variety of informal rules and strategies that simplify fundamentally difficult problems and allow us to solve them without excessive effort and stress. These strategies are generally effective, but the benefit of simplification is paid for at the cost of occasional systematic error. There is, in other words, an ease/accuracy trade-off in human judgment.
Among other things, to reiterate, representativeness leads to the belief that causes resemble their effects: Big effects should have big causes, complex effects should have complex causes, and so on.
No feature of human judgment and reasoning illustrates this trade-off of advantage and disadvantage better than the tendency for our expectations, preconceptions, and prior beliefs to influence our interpretation of new information. When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than
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No news there!
We are justified in allowing our beliefs and theories to influence our assessments of new information in direct proportion to how plausible and well-substantiated they are in the first place.
Thus, without this ability to use context and expectations to “go beyond the information given,”4 we would be unintelligent in the same way that computers with superior compututional capacity are unintelligent. As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and “biases” are what make us smart.
Our biases, preconceptions and theories make us smart.
The “bad guys” have worn black hats since the invention of motion pictures, and psychological research has shown that film directors who employ this tactic are capitalizing on a very basic psychological phenomenon: Surveys conducted in a wide range of cultures reveal that black is seen as the color of evil and death in virtually all corners of the world.
As a result of this bias, it is not surprising to learn that teams that wear black uniforms in these two sports have been penalized significantly more than average during the last two decades.5
Instead, people subtly and carefully “massage” the evidence to make it consistent with their expectations. (A similar argument is made in Chapter 5 about the biasing effects of our motivations).
Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.
An analysis of their comments indicated that they spent more time discussing their losses than their wins. Furthermore, the kind of comments made about wins and losses were quite different. The bettors tended to make “undoing” comments about their losses—comments to the effect that the outcome would have been different if not for some anomalous or “fluke” element (“… it was just luck. Their quarterback got hurt during the game and that probably led to their defeat.”). In contrast, they tended to make “bolstering” comments about their wins—comments indicating that the outcome either should have
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Rather than simply ignoring contradictory information, we often examine it particularly closely. The end product of this intense scrutiny is that the contradictory information is either considered too flawed to be relevant, or is redefined into a less damaging category.
The methodological critiques and publication recommendations of peer reviewers, for example, have been shown to be greatly affected by whether the results of a study support or oppose the reviewer’s own theoretical orientation.9
A problem with the peer reviewed literature that is not often acknowledged.
The French craniologist Paul Broca could not accept that the German brains he examined were on average 100 grams heavier than his sample of French brains. As a consequence, he adjusted the weights of the two brain samples to take into account extraneous factors such as overall body size that are related to brain weight. However, Broca never made a similar adjustment for his much-discussed difference in the brain sizes of men and women.10 The “criminal anthropologist” Cesare Lombroso supported his thesis about the primitive and animalistic nature of criminals and “lower races” by citing
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The biggest difference between the world of science and everyday life in protecting against erroneous beliefs is that scientists utilize a set of formal procedures to guard against the sources of bias and error discussed in this book—a set of procedures of which the average person is insufficiently aware, and has not adequately adopted in daily life. Scientists employ relatively simple statistical tools to guard against the misperception of random sequences discussed in Chapter 2. They utilize control groups and random sampling to avoid drawing inferences from incomplete and unrepresentative
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This kind of precise specification of what constitutes “success” and “failure” is something we rarely do in everyday life, and consequently our preconceptions often lead us to interpret the meaning of various outcomes in ways that favor our initial expectations.
We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility.13 We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed. One of the biggest impediments to doing so is our failure to realize that when we do not precisely specify the kind of evidence that will count as support for our position, we can end up “detecting” too much evidence for our preconceptions.
The essence of a number of beliefs is that certain events tend to happen within some (unspecified) period of time. The belief that things “happen in threes” is a perfect example: Many people believe that events like plane crashes, serial-killing sprees, or birth announcements tend to occur in triplets. It is almost certainly the case, however, that these beliefs are mere superstitions that stem from the tendency to allow the occurrence of the third event in the triplet to define the period of time that constitutes their “happening together.”
The Barnum effect refers to the tendency for people to accept as uncannily descriptive of themselves the same generally worded assessment, as long as they believe it was written specifically for them on the basis of some “diagnostic” instrument such as a horoscope or personality inventory.
Darwin, for example, in a statement that reflects his characteristic care and attention to detail, said that he “… followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”16
And, as any student of psychology can tell you, there is the “Zeigarnik effect,” or the tendency for people to remember interrupted tasks better than those that have been completed.20
Thus, one way in which commonsense psychology is correct (in that information that supports our beliefs is indeed particularly memorable) is that confirmatory events are in fact much more memorable than non-confirmatory events.
Asymmetries in hedonic and instrumental consequences can also lead to the formation and maintenance of beliefs that can have more serious consequences, such as those that induce marital conflict.
ii. Pattern asymmetries. A second variable that makes some events one-sided is whether there is an asymmetry in the numerical, spatial, or temporal pattern produced by the various outcomes. Many people report that when they wake up in the middle of the night, their digital clocks indicate that it is something like 2:22, 3:33, or 1:23 “too often.” This is no doubt because such outcomes stand out—in a way that 3:51 or 2:47 does not—as a result of the pattern or “unit” that is formed. Indeed, a great deal of numerology depends upon certain coincidences being imbued with special meaning because
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iii. “Definitional” asymmetries. Certain events are one-sided almost by definition. The outcomes relevant to the belief that “I can always tell when someone has had a facelift” is one example. Those that one detects lend support to the belief, but those that go undetected are simply that—undetected. They do not disconfirm the belief except in those rare instances in which an unsuspected person reveals that he or she has secretly undergone such surgery.
iv. Base-rate departures. Perhaps the most common determinant of whether an event is one-sided is the base-rate frequency of the different possible outcomes. When certain outcomes occur frequently enough, they become part of our experiential background and go unnoticed. Departures from normality, in contrast, can generate surprise and draw attention. The unexpected can sometimes be unusually memorable.
Erving Goffman referred to as “negatively eventful actions,” or those actions and customs that are so common and automatic that we only become aware of them when someone fails to honor them.24 All of us have a preferred distance that we like to maintain from others—a “personal space” that governs the physical closeness of our interactions. Few of us, however, are aware of the precise dimensions or even the existence of such a bubble until someone invades it. It is only when someone violates the spacing norm that we even notice that it exists. Similarly, we tend to face forward in an elevator,
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Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
a phenomenon known to economists and decision theorists as the “reluctance to trade” or the “endowment effect.”1 Ownership creates an inertia that prevents people from completing many seemingly-beneficial economic transactions.
Empirical Support for the Wish to Believe. The idea that we tend to believe what we want to believe has been around for a long time, and considerable evidence consistent with this notion has accumulated.
For example, a large majority of the general public thinks that they are more intelligent,4 more fair-minded,5 less prejudiced,6 and more skilled behind the wheel of an automobile7 than the average person.
A survey of one million high-school seniors found that 70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2% thought they were below average. In terms of ability to get along with others, all students thought they were above average, 60% thought they were in the top 10%, and 25% thought they were in the top 1%!9 Lest one think that such inflated self-assessments occur only in the minds of callow high-school students, it should be pointed out that a survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleague.10
Mechanisms Underlying Self-serving Beliefs. The results of these investigations are clear and consistent: We are inclined to adopt self-serving beliefs about ourselves, and comforting beliefs about the world. The interpretation of these results, however, is extremely controversial.
