Tag Archives: Standard Biases

Even if you're familiar with the ideas that are presented on this blog, it can be surprising just how strong the forces of habit and rote cognition and behavior can be.

One of the schools of cognitive psychology that addresses biases describes "system 1" and "system 2" thinking, where "system 1" is everyday automatic processing, deciding by intuition, relying on heuristics, and totally filled with biases, and "system 2" is thoughtful and careful consideration, logical and methodical. But this seems inadequate, because we can slip into automatic cognitive patterns even when we are consciously trying to be careful.

A few examples from personal experience below the fold…

Continue reading "The surprising power of rote cognition" »

Many say that consumers are biased to prefer the middle of three options, and to buy less when offered more options.  In the latest American Economic Review, Emir Kamenica shows these need not be biases:

Continue reading "Why We Like Middle Options, Small Menus" »

Violet: I like him.
Mary: You like every boy.
Violet: What's wrong with that?
                     It's a Wonderful Life

In places like Sweden, folks are more reserved and less "friendly" than in the U.S.   When reserved and friendly cultures meet, the reserved folks often say they were initially fooled into thinking others liked them in particular.  It took time to realize that their acting "friendly" did not actually indicate that they were more likely end up being friends in deeper ways.  Eventually they learned to gauge how much foreigners from that friendly culture like them by comparing how those foreigners treat them, relative to how they treat others.  Friendliness, as a signal of deeper interest and loyalty, is relative.  

The movie quote above describes a common insight, that some people are "too easy" as friends.  But salesman, politicians, etc. seem to usually act extra friendly to everyone; do we discount them enough for their being too easily "friendly"?

Chris Dillow:

OK, maybe Chris exaggerates; we do sometimes want experts more for info than certainty.  How can we tell when?  And how much does this contribute to resistance to prediction markets that give honest certainty estimates?  Hat tip Mark Thoma via Tyler Cowen.

Imagine someone made a unlikely claim that to you, i.e., a claim to which you would have assigned a low probability.  For many kinds of unlikely claims, such as that your mother was just in a car accident, you usually just believe them.  But if the claim was suspiciously dramatic, you may well suspect they had fallen prey to common human biases toward dramatic claims.  Here are a four reasons for such distrust:

Craziness If someone told you they were abducted by aliens, talked with God, or saw a chair levitate, you might suspect a serious mental malfunction, whereby he just could not reliably see or remember what he saw.  This doubt might be overcome if he showed you reliable sight and memory, and that he was not then in some altered more susceptible state of mind (e.g., trance).  Adding more similarly qualified observers would help too.

Continue reading "Distrusting Drama" »

Say your first car got 10 mpg, and you replaced it with a 20 mpg car.  Now you’re ready to get another car.  How many mpg will your new car need to get, to be as much of an improvement over your last car (gas-wise), as that car was over your first car?

A recent Science article, summarized here, reports on this as an instance of a simple yet subtle bias: When given information, people assume that the effects relevant to them scale linearly with the measurement scale used. In this instance, it’s miles per gallon.

If this were wartime, and you were rationed 10 gallons per week, the measurement of interest to you in evaluating a car’s mileage might be the number of different places you could visit once a week with that car.  Then the relevant statistic would be (miles/gallon)².  But since we aren’t rationing gas, a better measurement is gallons per mile, which can be translated into dollars and environmental impact per mile.

When people are given figures in miles per gallon, they usually think that the answer to the above question is 30 mpg.  "Sixty percent of participants ordered the pairs according to linear improvement and 1% according to actual improvement. A third strategy, proportional improvement, was used by 10% of participants."  (The proportional strategy says that the answer is 40 mpg.)

People get the right answer when you rephrase the question in units that scale linearly with the effect.  Try this:  Your first car could go 100 miles on 10 gallons of gas.  Your second car could go 100 miles on 5 gallons of gas.  Your third car needs to go 100 miles on… 0 gallons of gas.  So it needs to get infinite mpg, to match the improvement in going from 10 to 20 mpg.

I believe in trusting my intuition. 
I believe children are our future.
I believe Jesus will come again.
I believe humanity won’t survive the century.
I believe sex is beautiful and natural.
I believe myth is more potent than history.
I believe I can do anything I set my mind to.
I believe everyone deserves a second chance.

Why say "I believe X" instead of just saying X?  After all, we typically claim to believe most what we say.  Sometimes "I believe X" indicates you are especially tentative and open to persuasion about X, but that doesn’t seem to cover the above examples, nor the famous "This I believe" essays, on authors’ "rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values in their lives" and "the core values and beliefs that guide their daily lives."

These examples seem to be 1) clear value statements, 2) obvious truths few would dispute, which seem to represent values, and 3) controversial factual claims.  They all seem to indicate a strong emotional attachment, which might be can be fine for values, but is a rationality no-no for factual beliefs, especially controversial ones. 

If you feel tempted to say "I believe X" and can feel your emotions swell with the evil pleasure of attachment via belief, watch out!  Beware that road to rationality ruin. 

Added:  People rarely use "I value X" as a roundabout way to express a factual belief.  So their frequently saying "I believe X" as a way to express values seems to me further evidence that people often see values not as irreducible differing preferences, but as conditional values that we would share were it not for differing fact-like beliefs.  That is, we can imagine possible worlds in which the other values would make sense, but we believe we are not in those worlds.

Science Friday highlighted research suggesting we jump more to conclusions when we feel out of control:

In situations in which a person is not in control, they’re more likely to spot patterns where none exist, see illusions, and believe in conspiracy theories. In a series of experiments, researchers created situations in which people had less control over their situation, and then tested how likely the participants were to see imaginary images embedded in snowy pictures. The researchers also had participants write about either a situation in which they had control, or a situation in which they didn’t, and then presented stories involving strange coincidences. People who had written about a situation in which they were not in control were more likely to draw non-existent connections between the coincidences, the researchers found.

This summary suggests out-of-control-feeling folks are biased to see more than there is, but perhaps in-control-feeling folks are biased to see less than there is.   

Most of the discussion on this blog seems to focus on figuring out how to identify biases.  We implicitly assume that this is the hard part; that biases can be really sneaky and hard to ferret out, but that once you’ve identified a bias, correcting it is pretty straightforward and mechanical.  If you’ve figured out that you have a bias that causes you to systematically overestimate the probability of a particular kind of event happening by .2, you simply subtract .2 from future estimates (or whatever).  But it seems to me that actually correcting a bias can be pretty hard even once it’s been identified.  For example, I have a tendency to swing a bit too late at a (slow-pitch) softball.  I’m sure this bias could be at least partially corrected with effort, but it is definitely not simply a matter of saying to myself: "swing .5 seconds sooner than you feel like you should swing."  That just can’t be done in real time without screwing up the other mechanics of the swing.

I think this is also a problem for more consequential matters  In real decision-making situations, where there are elements of the problem that need attention besides the (already identified) bias, it is not going to be a trivial matter to fix the bias without screwing up some other part of the problem even worse.  I’m not sure this is the right way to put it, but it seems like OB engineering is a seperate and important discipline distinct from OB science.