Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

thinking like a Freak is simple enough that anyone can do it. What’s perplexing is that so few people do. Why is that? One reason is that it’s easy to let your biases—political, intellectual, or otherwise—color your view of the world. A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.

it is easier to fall in line with what your family and friends think than to find new family and friends! But running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

“Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts.”)

too many economists’ predictions fail because they overestimate the impact of future technologies,

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying “I don’t know” is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual. Think back to the soccer player who was about to take a life-changing penalty kick. Aiming toward the center has a better chance of success, but aiming toward a corner is less risky to his own reputation. So that’s where he shoots. Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don’t know an answer. The incentives to fake it are simply too strong.

While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. “If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government, or the economy, or something—then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,” he says. “It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely. I’ve used this idea to explain why African-Americans have lower suicide rates, why blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal, and why adolescent suicide rates often rise as their quality of life gets better.”

The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say “I don’t know”—and then follow up, certainly, with “but maybe I can find out.”

Kids don’t buy into dogma. “They’re relatively free of assumptions and expectations about how the world works,” Stone says, “and magic is all about turning your assumptions and expectations against you.

the herd-mentality incentive beat out the moral, social, and financial incentives.

Mark Twain once wrote: “[T]he best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.”

Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame. It is most powerful when least expected, like when things have gone wrong. Some of the most loyal customers any company has are the ones who had a big problem but got treated incredibly well as it was being resolved.

Whenever you set out to persuade someone, remember that you are merely the producer of the argument. The consumer has the only vote that counts. Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn’t resonate for the recipient, you won’t get anywhere.

If you make an argument that promises all benefits and no costs, your opponent will never buy it—nor

When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs—even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback.

When you talk about problems like income inequality, poverty generally, famine, we tend to focus on the parts of the problem that disturb us, the very visible parts which are often not even the problem so much as the symptom. And then ideology gets involved, and there are a lot of arguments by people on every side, kind of shouting at each other, not really trying to persuade each other but just making their argument to prove how right they are. None of which is very productive.

the challenge is teaching intelligent people to be less biased and that’s really hard.

we talk all the time about correlation versus causality. And what makes data so hard is that the only thing you actually see in the data directly is correlation, right? You just know whether two things tend to go together. Causality comes from something deeper. Causality is something which, absent a randomized experiment, you have to intuit or trick the data into revealing. And all we really care about is causality, and that’s the fundamental challenge of social science in a world where you see correlations. How can you know causality? And that’s where the art and the fun and the joy of what we do comes in.