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November 27, 2021 - January 23, 2022
Research indicates that decisions based on objective criteria alone are at least as effective as those influenced by subjective impressions formed in an interview.
Human nature abhors a lack of predictability and the absence of meaning.
Parents listen to their teenagers’ music backwards and claim to hear Satanic messages in the chaotic waves of noise that are produced.
with hindsight it is always possible to spot the most anomalous features of the data and build a favorable statistical analysis around them.
rewarding desirable responses is generally more effective in shaping behavior than punishing undesirable responses.
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.
It is hard to look good when you only have two options and both of them are bad.
people often test their hypotheses by seeking out potentially confirmatory information.
When a psychic predicts that “a famous politician will die this year,” it is important to specify then and there the range of events that will constitute a success.
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.
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
Ownership creates an inertia that prevents people from completing many seemingly-beneficial economic transactions.
Our desire to believe comforting things about ourselves and about the world does not mean that we believe willy-nilly what we want to believe;
When the initial evidence supports our preferences, we are generally satisfied and terminate our search; when the initial evidence is hostile, however, we often dig deeper, hoping to find more comforting information, or to uncover reasons to believe that the original evidence was flawed.
By considering a number of different sources of evidence and declaring victory whenever supportive data are obtained, the person is likely to end up spuriously believing that his or her suspicion is valid.
“… everybody ranks himself high in qualities he values: careful drivers give weight to care, skillful drivers give weight to skill, and those who think that, whatever else they are not, at least they are polite, give weight to courtesy, and come out high on their own scale. This is the way that every child has the best dog on the block.”
some evidence has accumulated that people who habitually fail to put the most favorable cast on their circumstances run the risk of depression.
We carefully choose furniture and works of art that do not clash, just as we try to avoid the dissonance produced by incompatible beliefs.
Other times, however, people knowingly provide misinformation in the service of what they believe to be “the greater truth.” This happens at all levels.
With respect to the coverage of AIDS, we should know that we ought to give more credence to the words of epidemiologists than sex therapists, rock stars, or actors. Epidemiologists spend their working hours trying to understand and predict the spread of infectious diseases. No one is more equipped than they to issue projections about the spread of AIDS.
Any testimonial, no matter how moving, represents the experience of only one person.
Previous accounts of gossip have discussed how it serves as a way for people to achieve a stable and shared definition of reality;
Having an untreatable disease—or the possibility of contracting one—is so threatening that people desperately grasp at claims that the threat is not so severe or so completely beyond their control.
Roughly 50% of all illnesses for which people seek medical help are “self limited”—i.e., they are cured by the body’s own healing processes without assistance from medical science.6
With the body so effective in healing itself, many who seek medical assistance will experience a positive outcome even if the doctor does nothing beneficial. Thus, even a worthless treatment can appear effective when the base-rate of success is so high.
many alternative health practices do not offer precise remedies for specific disabilities. They promise instead to bring about “wellness,” “higher functioning,” or “better integration”—ambiguous benefits that may be hard to refute.
an insightful Frenchman once remarked after visiting Lourdes, where there is an abundant supply of discarded eyeglasses, hearing aids, canes, etc., “What? No artificial limbs?”
These remedies ignore the fact that the body transforms most ingested substances, and therefore whatever properties they have outside the body can be radically altered or completely absent inside.
we need to question whether our beliefs (about health or anything else) stem mainly from a sense of surface plausibility.
It speaks to how far perseverance and hard work have fallen in value in the current culture that such strategies of self-presentation are so commonly employed. It also makes one wonder about the future of a society that more visibly rewards beauty, glibness, and athletic prowess over determination and sustained effort.*
A great many name-droppers, bores, boasters, and self-handicappers walk away from social encounters convinced that they have skillfully managed the interaction and made a favorable impression—while
people tend to think that sufficient quantity can compensate for a lack of quality.
Science requires that a phenomenon be reliably produced in different laboratories for it to be accepted as genuine.
