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A lot of what people did and said when they “predicted” things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things.
That’s how bad the problem was: that a very good NBA player would never have been given a serious chance to play in the NBA, simply because the minds of experts had concluded he did not belong. How many other Jeremy Lins were out there?
Faith is God made sensible to the heart,
can’t decide which bundle of hay is closer to him, and so dies of hunger. “Leibowitz would then say that no donkey would do this; a donkey would just go at random to one or the other and eat. It’s only when decisions are made by people that they get more complicated. And then he said, ‘What happens to a country when a donkey makes the decisions that people are supposed to make you can read every day in the paper.’ His class was always full.”
“WASP Psychology” and “Jewish Psychology.” The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats and all the while avoided the great wet mess of human experience. The Jews embraced the mess—even the Jews who disdained Freud’s methods and longed for “objectivity” and wished to search for the kinds of truth that might be tested according to the rules of science.
The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship between any external stimulus and the sensation it created in people, as the mind intervened in many curious ways.
“I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen,” he said. “If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.”
“Obviously a halo of general merit is extended to influence the rating for the special ability, or vice versa,” Thorndike concluded; he went on to say that he had “become convinced that even a very capable foreman, employer, teacher, or department head is unable to view an individual as a compound of separate qualities and to assign a magnitude to each of these in independence of the others.” Thus was born what is still called “the halo effect.”
“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it. The question the Israeli military had asked him—Which personalities are best suited to which military roles?—had turned out to make no sense. And so Danny had gone and answered a different, more fruitful question: How do we prevent the intuition of interviewers from screwing up their assessment of army recruits?
Instead he’d found out something about people who try to divine other people’s character: Remove their gut feelings, and their judgments improved.
The exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives.
“All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.”
Once, after Amos gave a talk, an English statistician had approached him. “I don’t usually like Jews but I like you,” the statistician said. Amos replied, “I usually like Englishmen but I don’t like you.”
“Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”
the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do.
“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”
“He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.’”
“The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”
They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated.
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.
They’d have tended to perform better (or worse) even if the teacher had said nothing at all. An illusion of the mind tricked teachers—and probably many others—into thinking that their words were less effective when they gave pleasure than when they gave pain. Statistics wasn’t just boring numbers; it contained ideas that allowed you to glimpse deep truths about human life.
“it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”
To which Amos, by himself, appended: “Edwards . . . has argued that people fail to extract sufficient information or certainty from probabilistic data; he called this failure conservatism. Our respondents can hardly be described as conservative. Rather, in accord with the representation hypothesis, they tend to extract more certainty from the data than the data, in fact, contain.” (“Ward Edwards was established,” said Danny. “And we were taking pot shots—Amos was sticking his tongue out at him.”)
It was counter to all the work that was being done—which was governed by the idea that you were going to explain human judgment by correcting for some more or less minor error to the Bayesian model. It was exactly contrary to the ideas that I had. Statistics was the way you should think about probabilistic situations, but statistics was not the way people did it. Their subjects were all sophisticated in statistics—and even they got it wrong! Every question in the paper that the audience got wrong I felt the temptation to get wrong.” That verdict—that Danny and Amos’s paper wasn’t just fun but
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People’s “intuitive expectations are governed by a consistent misperception of the world,” Danny and Amos had written in their final paragraph. The misperception was rooted in the human mind.
When people make judgments, they argued, they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds. How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm? How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer? Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player? Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide? The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making
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The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.
special ease, and so be disproportionately weighted in any judgment. Danny and Amos had noticed how oddly, and often unreliably, their own minds recalculated the odds, in light of some recent or memorable experience. For instance, after they drove past a gruesome car crash on the highway, they slowed down: Their sense of the odds of being in a crash had changed. After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people’s judgment of the odds—their sense of the odds could be changed
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Amos and Danny wrote, “the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.” Human judgment was distorted by . . . the memorable.
“The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,” wrote Danny and Amos. “There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.”
What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. “We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”
His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said. Everything that didn’t seem to Amos obviously important he chucked, and thus what he saved acquired the interest of objects that have survived a pitiless culling.
People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable At
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“In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty,” they wrote, “people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic error.”
Man’s inability to see the power of regression to the mean leaves him blind to the nature of the world around him. We are exposed to a lifetime schedule in which we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.
It confirmed Biederman’s sense that “most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from ‘hmmm, that’s funny.’”
In the course of our personal and professional lives, we often run into situations that appear puzzling at first blush. We cannot see for the life of us why Mr. X acted in a particular way, we cannot understand how the experimental results came out the way they did, etc. Typically, however, within a very short time we come up with an explanation, a hypothesis, or an interpretation of the facts that renders them understandable, coherent, or natural. The same phenomenon is observed in perception. People are very good at detecting patterns and trends even in random data. In contrast to our skill
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The historians in his audience of course prided themselves on their “ability” to construct, out of fragments of some past reality, explanatory narratives of events which made them seem, in retrospect, almost predictable. The only question that remained, once the historian had explained how and why some event had occurred, was why the people in his narrative had not seen what the historian could now see. “All the historians attended Amos’s talk,” recalled Biederman, “and they left ashen-faced.”
There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.
chose the surgery. People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.
“Most physicians try to maintain this facade of being rational and scientific and logical and it’s a great lie,” said Redelmeier. “A partial lie. What leads us is hopes and dreams and emotion.”
[A] single day of severe pain and extreme weather might sustain a lifetime of belief in a relation between them.”
They didn’t simply experience fixed levels of happiness or unhappiness. They experienced one thing and remembered something else.
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
That leap of faith had at least one obvious implication for the sort of advice economists gave to political leaders: It tilted everything in the direction of giving people the freedom to choose and leaving markets alone. After all, if people could be counted on to be basically rational, markets could, too. Amos had clearly wondered about
Danny read Amos’s textbook the way he might have read a recipe written in Martian. He decoded it. He
Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.
The understanding of any decision had to account not just for the financial consequences but for the emotional ones, too.
When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.
