Tag Archives: Standard Biases

Seeing Red

By Robin Hanson · September 5, 2009 10:30 pm · Comments (25)

Seeing the color red apparently has large influences on our behavior.  Referees award more points to competitors wearing red, who win more competitions.  Test takers scored worse if their subject number was written in red, women wearing red are asked on dates more, and so on:

“There is now good experimental evidence that red stimuli are perceived as dominant and that they cause negative effects on performance in those viewing them,” Barton says. “It is plausible that wearing red also makes individuals feel more confident, although this hasn’t yet been tested.” …  Mandrills, the world’s largest species of monkey, use colour as a means of conflict management. In males, red faces, rumps and genitalia act as a status symbol, communicating fighting ability. “The brighter red a male is, the higher his testosterone level and the more aggressive he is,” … Other primates use more subtle variations in facial redness to signal dominance. Rhesus monkeys, for example, become redder in the face in the mating season.

Barton believes that red is involved in human behaviour in a similar way. “Subtle variations in redness are conveying information about dominance, vigour and confidence. In an aggressive confrontation, confident individuals flush red with anger whereas frightened individuals go pale. … Even a brief glimpse of red can change human abilities and behaviour in all sorts of ways. … What consistently impresses researchers is the fact that their volunteers rarely suspect that colour plays an important, or indeed any, role in the outcome of an experiment. … “Given that the influence of colour on our behaviour is so prevalent, it’s shocking that we aren’t more aware of it.”

Yes, shocking.  We have two main stories for this lack of awareness: accident and purpose.  Some suggest we shouldn’t expect our conscious minds to know much about how our unconscious minds work, while others suggest an inquisitive and social species like humans could not long remain ignorant about something this important without substantial pressures discouraging such insight.

This purpose story makes more sense to me.  I can see two pressures against insight here:

  1. We avoid seeing our own status moves, including reacting to red as a dominance marker.
  2. We identify ourselves as making decisions based on respectable criteria, which don’t include red effects.
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Blowhard Insight

By Robin Hanson · August 3, 2009 12:15 pm · Comments (5)

David Mazzotta gets me:

The trick when surfing these days is not to find curious bits of entertainment news that is ahead of the curve, but to find high quality thoughtful posting; things of intellectual or critical value that you can really sink your teeth into. In that respect, the web is no different than any other source of communication. So let me recommend four “blogs” where I regularly find thoughtful posts. Were I still an old school blogger, I bet 80% my posts would come from these places.  First and foremost is Overcoming Bias.

Yes, thoughtful is what I’m trying for.  One of the other three blogs is 2blowhards, where I find this insightful gem:

Killing time waiting for The Wife at the hair salon, I leafed through some women’s magazines. … I had a good time noting down some of the fantasies … these magazines’ readers enjoy indulging in:

  • Spend a year in a foreign country, and you’ll discover your true self. …
  • Embracing who and what you are — whatever that means — will make you look ten years younger.
  • Jobs aren’t about selling something others are willing to pay for. Jobs are about personal fulfillment. …
  • Emotions — no matter which, no matter when — need to be faced and worked-through. Then you’ll feel great.
  • Following your instincts and your feelings will always work out for the best. …
  • The troubles of movie stars are just like yours.

No doubt marketing to men involves similarly implausible fantasies.  Marketing seems all about identity, something economists know relatively little about. Makes me want to study the subject more.

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Who Will Fight Group Think?

By Robin Hanson · July 26, 2009 9:00 am · Comments (19)

At TierneyLab, Nickolas Wade complains about groupthink:

Conformity and group-think are attitudes of particular danger in science, an endeavor that is inherently revolutionary because progress often depends on overturning established wisdom. … If the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not – how could so many climatologists be wrong?

Wade cites Shiller on group think at the Fed:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, acknowledged in a Congressional hearing last month that he had made an “error” … Mr. Greenspan’s comments may have left the impression that no one in the world could have predicted the crisis. Yet … lots of people were worried about the housing boom and its potential for creating economic disaster. It’s just that the Fed did not take them very seriously.  … Continue reading "Who Will Fight Group Think?" »

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Stupider Than You Realize

By Robin Hanson · July 4, 2009 9:30 am · Comments (39)

A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is.  This was certainly my experience in moving from top rank universities as a student to a mid rank university as a teacher.  A better intuition for common abilities can be found by browsing the US National Assesment of Adult Literacy sample questions.

For example, in 1992 out of a random sample of US adults, 7% could not do item SCOR300, which is to find the expiration date on a driver’s license.  26% could not do item AB60303, which is to check the “Please Call” box on a phone message slip when they’ve been told:

James Davidson phones and asks to speak with Ann Jones, who is at a meeting. He needs to know if the contracts he sent are satisfactory and requests that she call before 2:00 p.m. His number is 259-3860. Fill in the message slip below.

Only 52% could do item AB30901, which is to look at a table on page 118 of the 1980 World Almanac and answer:

According to the chart, did U.S. exports of oil (petroleum) increase or decrease between 1976 and 1978?

Only 16% could do item N010301, which is to answer “What is the purpose of the Se Habla Espanol expo?” after reading a short newspaper article called “Se Habla Espanol Hits Chicago; September 25,26,27 are three days that will change your marketing.” The article includes this quote: Continue reading "Stupider Than You Realize" »

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For The Truth, Ask Friends

By Robin Hanson · June 19, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (9)

John Bargh at The Edge:

“If all these things are going on without my knowledge, then I don’t really know why I’m doing what I’m doing, and I don’t really know myself that well apparently. So how can I make the right decisions or make the right choices for myself when all these biases are throwing my decisions all over the place?”

There’s a really simple answer here, which I like and people also seem to like it. It is to ask your friends, ask your family, ask people who are close to you about yourself. Don’t be afraid to hear what they have to say. Tell them to tell you the truth, because they do know you, and in many ways better than you know yourself.

That’s the funny thing about all of this. It turns out we do know about other people pretty well. We’re much better at predicting other people’s behavior than our own, and Emily Pronin at Princeton, whose research has focused on this issue, gives a great example of when she was deciding on grad schools to go to. Continue reading "For The Truth, Ask Friends" »

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Pretending To Be What You Are

By Robin Hanson · May 8, 2009 2:00 pm · Comments (9)

Which is harder: pretending to be what you are, or to pretending to be what you are not?   For example, imagine you are a news reporter, and want to, via your style and manners, convince typical folks that you are a) a reporter, or b) a stuntman.  Which task would be easier?   Which task would be easier for the stuntman?  We could ask such questions about not just reporters and stuntmen, but about a wide range of other roles.

The way to convince the public that you are an X is to act the way the public thinks that X folks act.  And the more vivid an image X folks have in the public mind, and the fewer real X the public know in person, the more the way X folks are will diverge from how the public thinks they are.  And so the more work it would be for X folks to convince the public, via their manner and style, that they are in fact X.

So while it is probably easier for a shoe salesman to convince folks that they sell shoes than that they are a private investigator, I'm guessing that it is harder for a P.I. to convince folks they are a P.I. than that they sell shoes. 

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Telephone Game With Functions

By Robin Hanson · April 22, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (9)

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In the old telephone game each person would pass on a phrase to the next person in the chain; the final phrase might little resemble the first.  An interesting variation appeared in the Phil. Trans. Royal Society last November:

Inductivebias

Here each row is a chain of people passing along a function relating X to Y.  Each person first guesses and is corrected on 50 (X,Y) cases, then just guesses on 100 more cases.  The final guesses of the last person become data for the next person.  The final relations are all basically lines, 7/8 with a positive slope, 1/8 with a negative slope.

The lesson?  When we are mainly rewarded for predicting what others will say on a topic, rather than predicting a more basic reality, our answers become dominated by typical prior expectations; reality has little influence.  HT to Jef Allbright. More from that paper:

Continue reading "Telephone Game With Functions" »

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Rational Paranoia

By Robin Hanson · April 13, 2009 9:45 am · Comments (5)

The Post reminds us paranoia can be quite rational:

"People from North Korea are very paranoid," said Kim Heekyung, a clinical psychologist at Hanowan [in South Korea] who supervises group therapy for defectors.  Paranoia, she added, is a rational response to reality in North Korea.

A new U.N. human rights report describes North Korea as a place where ordinary people "live in fear and are pressed to inform on each other. The state practices extensive surveillance of its inhabitants. . . . Authorities have bred a culture of pervasive mistrust."

When defectors arrive at Hanowan, they whisper. They are reluctant to disclose their names or dates of birth. They question the motives of people who want to help them. They say South Koreans look down on them. On field trips from Hanowan to get their first checking accounts, they find bank tellers to be terrifying. …

"Paranoia in North Korea helped people survive, but here in South Korea, it is an obstacle to assimilation," Kim said. "Many defectors are scared to do anything."

Our problem isn't a capacity for paranoia, but is misreading clues about when to invoke that capacity.   We say someone has a mental problem if they are more paranoid than we think makes sense in our society.  But of course personal circumstances will vary, so we should beware of overconfident paternalism in judging when others are excessively paranoid.

Among North Korean defectors the opposite mental problem of insufficient paranoia is probably more common.  Alas we don't see many of those folks for obvious reasons.

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Incentives, Allies Cut Bias

By Robin Hanson · April 3, 2009 9:00 am · Comments (4)
This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to test whether and to what extent individuals succumb to the conjunction fallacy. Using an experimental design of Kahneman and Tversky (1983), it finds that given mild incentives, the proportion of individuals who violate the conjunction principle is significantly lower than that reported by Kahneman and Tversky. Moreover, when subjects are allowed to consult with other subjects, these proportions fall dramatically, particularly when the size of the group rises from two to three. These findings cast serious doubts about the importance and robustness of such violations for the understanding of real-life economic decisions.

More here.  Hat tip to Dan Houser.

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Write Your Hypothetical Apostasy

By Nick Bostrom · February 21, 2009 10:14 am · Comments (47)

Let's say you have been promoting some view (on some complex or fraught topic – e.g. politics, religion; or any "cause" or "-ism") for some time.  When somebody criticizes this view, you spring to its defense.  You find that you can easily refute most objections, and this increases your confidence.  The view might originally have represented your best understanding of the topic.  Subsequently you have gained more evidence, experience, and insight; yet the original view is never seriously reconsidered.  You tell yourself that you remain objective and open-minded, but in fact your brain has stopped looking and listening for alternatives.

Here is a debiasing technique one might try: writing a hypothetical apostasy.  Remind yourself before you start that unless you later choose to do so, you will never have to show this text to anyone.

Imagine, if you will, that the world's destruction is at stake and the only way to save it is for you to write a one-pager that convinces a jury that your old cherished view is mistaken or at least seriously incomplete.  The more inadequate the jury thinks your old cherished view is, the greater the chances that the world is saved.  The catch is that the jury consists of earlier stages of yourself (such as yourself such as you were one year ago).  Moreover, the jury believes that you have been bribed to write your apostasy; so any assurances of the form "trust me, I am older and know better" will be ineffective.  Your only hope of saving the world is by writing an apostasy that will make the jury recognize how flawed/partial/shallow/juvenile/crude/irresponsible/incomplete and generally inadequate your old cherished view is.

(If anybody tries this, feel free to comment below on whether you found the exersise fruitful or not – but no need to state which specific view you were considering or how it changed.)

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