Overcoming Bias

Scarcity

What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.  I own three copies of this book, one for myself, and two for loaning to friends.

Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

• If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one.  If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other.  (Brehm and Weintraub 1977.)
   
• When Dade County forbade use or possession of phosphate detergents, many Dade residents drove to nearby counties and bought huge amounts of phosphate laundry detergents.  Compared to Tampa residents not affected by the regulation, Dade residents rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective, more powerful on stains, and even believed that phosphate detergents poured more easily.  (Mazis 1975, Mazis et. al. 1973.)
  

Uninformative Experience

Michael Webster summarizes a key point from the book "Mistakes were made, but not by me":

"The more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, and inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made."

If you are looking to purchase a franchise, then don't look to the existing franchisees for information - if they are doing poorly, their brains will engage in self-deception trying to convince you of how good their choice was.  You should get in touch with other individual making the same pre-purchase decision - individuals who have not been to discovery day or who have been in contact with the franchisor.

Perhaps this is why the young don't listen much to the old. 

Bias And Power

Kaj Sotala points us to a finding that people ignore info more when they feel powerful.  On a related note, Michael Nielsen, quantum physicist extraordinaire, suggests a "bias toward power":

A form of bias I'm interested in is the great deference we pay to power, often far more than is warranted by the facts. I'm particularly interested in the damage this does to powerful people, since it greatly reduces the incentive they have to perform well ...

• People's early works, when they are unknown, are often better than their later works, after they've become famous. See, e.g., Tom Clancy.
• A professor speaking pretty much complete rubbish, and yet being taken seriously by a group of more junior academics. ...
• A professor shutting down a grad student in a group, simply by disagreeing with them. People tend to assume that the professor is right 100 percent of the time, and the student 0 percent. A more accurate breakup in my experience is 60/40. ...
• A rich or famous person holding forth on pretty much any subject, from things they understand well, through to things they barely understand at all, and having other people pay serious attention.

People relate to power two ways, via deference and defiance.  When we defer to power, we are indeed biased to give it too much inferential weight, but when we defy power, we give it too little inferential weight.  We listen too much to the powers that we feel allied with, and too little to powers we feel allied against.  To think more objectively, become less allied.

37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

Followup to:  Just about every post in February, and some in March

Some reader is bound to declare that a better title for this post would be "37 Ways That You Can Use Words Unwisely", or "37 Ways That Suboptimal Use Of Categories Can Have Negative Side Effects On Your Cognition".

But one of the primary lessons of this gigantic list is that saying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory.  You can always be wrong.  Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong.  There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do.  That's life.

Besides, I can define the word "wrong" to mean anything I like - it's not like a word can be wrong.

Personally, I think it quite justified to use the word "wrong" when:

1. A word fails to connect to reality in the first place.  Is Socrates a framster?  Yes or no?  (The Parable of the Dagger.)
   
   
2. Your argument, if it worked, could coerce reality to go a different way by choosing a different word definition.  Socrates is a human, and humans, by definition, are mortal.  So if you defined humans to not be mortal, would Socrates live forever?  (The Parable of Hemlock.)
   
   
3. You try to establish any sort of empirical proposition as being true "by definition".  Socrates is a human, and humans, by definition, are mortal.  So is it a logical truth if we empirically predict that Socrates should keel over if he drinks hemlock?  It seems like there are logically possible, non-self-contradictory worlds where Socrates doesn't keel over - where he's immune to hemlock by a quirk of biochemistry, say.  Logical truths are true in all possible worlds, and so never tell you which possible world you live in - and anything you can establish "by definition" is a logical truth.  (The Parable of Hemlock.)
   
   
4. You unconsciously slap the conventional label on something, without actually using the verbal definition you just gave.  You know perfectly well that Bob is "human", even though, on your definition, you can never call Bob "human" without first observing him to be mortal.  (The Parable of Hemlock.)
   
   
5. The act of labeling something with a word, disguises a challengable inductive inference you are making. If the last 11 egg-shaped objects drawn have been blue, and the last 8 cubes drawn have been red, it is a matter of induction to say this rule will hold in the future.  But if you call the blue eggs "bleggs" and the red cubes "rubes", you may reach into the barrel, feel an egg shape, and think "Oh, a blegg."  (Words as Hidden Inferences.)

Overvaluing Ideas

How do you tell whether something is good or bad?  Human judgment is surprisingly swayed by contextual cues, rather than by the actual attributes of the thing being judged.  As a recent Boston Globe article pointed out:

SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices. The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

The experiment was even more unusual because it was conducted inside a scanner - the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes - that allowed the scientists to see how the subjects' brains responded to each wine. When subjects were told they were getting a more expensive wine, they observed more activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure.

My Favorite Liar

[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar.

I guess that statement requires a bit of explanation.

The topic of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets is, even within the world of the Dismal Science, a exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

"Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day." And thus began our ten-week course.

Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity

Followup to:  Similarity Clusters

Birds fly.  Well, except ostriches don't.  But which is a more typical bird - a robin, or an ostrich?
Which is a more typical chair:  A desk chair, a rocking chair, or a beanbag chair?

Most people would say that a robin is a more typical bird, and a desk chair is a more typical chair.  The cognitive psychologists who study this sort of thing experimentally, do so under the heading of "typicality effects" or "prototype effects" (Rosch and Lloyd 1978).  For example, if you ask subjects to press a button to indicate "true" or "false" in response to statements like "A robin is a bird" or "A penguin is a bird", reaction times are faster for more central examples.  (I'm still unpacking my books, but I'm reasonably sure my source on this is Lakoff 1986.)  Typicality measures correlate well using different investigative methods - reaction times are one example; you can also ask people to directly rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how well an example (like a specific robin) fits a category (like "bird").

So we have a mental measure of typicality - which might, perhaps, function as a heuristic - but is there a corresponding bias we can use to pin it down?

Well, which of these statements strikes you as more natural:  "98 is approximately 100", or "100 is approximately 98"?  If you're like most people, the first statement seems to make more sense.  (Sadock 1977.)  For similar reasons, people asked to rate how similar Mexico is to the United States, gave consistently higher ratings than people asked to rate how similar the United States is to Mexico.  (Tversky and Gati 1978.)

And if that still seems harmless, a study by Rips (1975) showed that people were more likely to expect a disease would spread from robins to ducks on an island, than from ducks to robins.  Now this is not a logical impossibility, but in a pragmatic sense, whatever difference separates a duck from a robin and would make a disease less likely to spread from a duck to a robin, must also be a difference between a robin and a duck, and would make a disease less likely to spread from a robin to a duck.

Zut Allais!

Continuation of:  The Allais Paradox

Huh!  I was not expecting that response.  Looks like I ran into an inferential distance.

It probably helps in interpreting the Allais Paradox to have absorbed more of the gestalt of the field of heuristics and biases, such as:

• Experimental subjects tend to defend incoherent preferences even when they're really silly.
• People put very high values on small shifts in probability away from 0 or 1 (the certainty effect).
  

The Allais Paradox

Followup to:  But There's Still A Chance Right?, Beautiful Probability

Choose between the following two options:

1A.  $24,000, with certainty.
1B.  33/34 chance of winning $27,000, and 1/34 chance of winning nothing.

Which seems more intuitively appealing?  And which one would you choose in real life?

Leading bias researcher turns out to be... biased, renounces result

A few days ago, Robin posted on the Edge's annual question, which this year is about the changing of minds.  One of the participants (a social scientist who undoubtedly knows lots) is Daniel Kahneman.  It's impossible to overstate Kahneman's eminence.  He's unquestionably one of a handful of top researchers ever, and arguably the most important yet alive, on the subjects that make up the theme of this very blog.  In addition to being one of the inventors of the "heuristics and biases" research program, as well as prospect theory, he also won the 2002 "Nobel Prize" in economics. 

Yet he, too, is not immune from motivated error.  A friend and colleague recently forwarded Kahneman's Edge answer to me.  Apparently, Kahneman himself was so captivated by the lure of a neat theory to handle some difficulties in hedonic experience that he managed to misinterpret the first set of results!

Our hypothesis was that differences in life circumstances would have more impact on this measure than on life satisfaction.  We were so convinced that when we got our first batch of data, comparing teachers in top-rated schools to teachers in inferior schools, we actually misread the results as confirming our hypothesis.  In fact, they showed the opposite: the groups of teachers differed more in their work satisfaction than in their affective experience at work. This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact.  Measuring experienced happiness turned out to be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected.  We had simply been wrong. (Emphasis added)

Social scientists, beware.  If this can happen to Daniel Kahneman, it can happen to anyone.