Most people answer “librarian.” Which is a mistake: shy salespeople are much more common than shy librarians, because salespeople in general are much more common than librarians—seventy-five times as common, in the United States.1 This is base rate neglect : grounding one’s judgments in how well sets of characteristics feel like they fit together, and neglecting how common each characteristic is in the population at large.2 Another example of a cognitive bias is the sunk cost fallacy —people’s tendency to feel committed to things they’ve spent resources on in the past, when they should be
...more
