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Some Systematic Biases of Everyday Judgment Some systematic biases of everyday judgment http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19267325.html Home About Us Contact Us Help Search: Research Search tips Topics in the News: Some systematic biases of everyday judgment. From: Skeptical Inquirer | Date: 3/1/1997 | Author: Gilovich, Thomas Space: Final Frontier Print Digg del.icio.us Barack Obama 2008 Psychological research U.S. Attorney Firings shows that daily Sales Research Celebrities Largest behavior-based sales research project ever judgment and conducted. Misbehaving reasoning are biased in www.Huthwaite.com View more topics at predictable ways. Three Newser. common problems lead to judgment bias, Test in Dev. Psychology? namely, the 'compared Everyone Crams. You Can Cram Right. Browse Our Free Online Study Guides to what' problem, the www.CliffsNotes.com/DevPsych 'seek and ye shall find' problem and the selective memory problem. The scientific method was developed as an inferential safeguard for the inaccuracy of everyday judgment. Unfortunately, the scientific method is not widely taught and appreciated. Skeptics have long thought that everyday judgment and reasoning are biased in predictable ways. Psychological research on the subject conducted during the past quarter century largely confirms these suspicions. Two types of explanations are typically offered for the dubious beliefs that are dissected in SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. On one hand, there are motivational causes: Some beliefs are comforting, and so people embrace that comfort and convince 1 of 12 1/24/08 10:05 AM Some systematic biases of everyday judgment http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19267325.html themselves that a questionable proposition is true. Many types of religious beliefs, for example, are often explained this way. On the other hand, there are cognitive causes: faulty processes of reasoning and judgment that lead people to misevaluate the evidence of their everyday experience. The skeptical community is convinced that everyday judgment and reasoning leave much to be desired. Why are skeptics so unimpressed with the reasoning abilities and habits of the average person? Until recently, this pessimism was based on simple observation, often by those with a particularly keen eye for the foibles of human nature. Thus, skeptics often cite such thinkers as Francis Bacon, who stated: . all superstition is much the same whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like . [in that] the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect or pass over their failure, though it be much more common. (Bacon 1899/1620) John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell are two other classic scholars who, along with Bacon, are often quoted for their trenchant observations on the shortcomings of human judgment. It is also common to see similar quotes of more recent vintage - in SKEPTICAL INQUIRER and elsewhere - from the likes of Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Carl Sagan. During the past twenty-five years, a great deal of psychological Browse by research has dealt specifically with the quality of everyday alphabet: reasoning, and so it is now possible to go beyond simple A B C D E observation and arrive at a truly rigorous assessment of the shortcomings of everyday judgment. In so doing, we can F G H I J determine whether or not these scholars we all admire are K L M N O correct. Do people misevaluate evidence in the very ways and P Q R S T for the very reasons that Bacon, Russell, and others have claimed? Let us look at the research record and see. U V W X Y Z The "Compared to What?" Problem Need more Some of the common claims about the fallibility of human research? Get credible articles from reasoning stand up well to empirical scrutiny. For example, it is trusted sources at commonly argued that people have difficulty with what might HighBeam Research: be called the "compared to what" problem. That is, people are Newspaper archives often overly impressed with an absolute statistic without Magazine back issues 2 of 12 1/24/08 10:05 AM Some systematic biases of everyday judgment http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19267325.html recognizing that its true import can only be assessed by Academic journals comparison to some relevant baseline. Medical journals Nursing journals Psychology journals For instance, a 1986 article in Discover magazine (cited in Book reviews Dawes 1988) urges readers who fly in airplanes to "know And more! where the exits are and rehearse in your mind exactly how to get to them." Why? The article approvingly notes that someone who interviewed almost two hundred survivors of fatal airline accidents found that ". more than 90% had their escape routes mentally mapped out beforehand." Good for them, but note that whoever did the study cannot interview anyone who perished in an airplane crash. Air travel being as scary as it is to so many people, perhaps 90 percent or more of those who died in airline crashes rehearsed their escape routes as well. Ninety percent sounds impressive because it is so close to 100 percent. But without a more pertinent comparison, it really does not mean much. Similarly, people are often impressed that, say, 30 percent of all infertile couples who adopt a child subsequently conceive. That is great news for that 30 percent to be sure, but what percentage of those who do not adopt likewise conceive? People likewise draw broad conclusions from a cancer patient who goes into remission after steadfastly practicing mental imagery. Again, excellent news for that individual, but might the cancer have gone into remission even if the person had not practiced mental imagery? This problem of failing to invoke a relevant baseline of comparison is particularly common when the class of data that requires inspection is inherently difficult to collect. Consider, for example, the commonly expressed opinion, "I can always tell that someone is wearing a hairpiece." Are such claims to be believed, or is it just that one can tell that someone is wearing a hairpiece . when it is obvious that he is wearing a hair-piece? After all, how can one tell whether some have gone undetected? The goal of a good hairpiece is to fool the public, and so the example is one of those cases in which the confirmations speak loudly while the disconfirmations remain silent. A similar asymmetry should give pause to those who have extreme confidence in their "gaydar," or their ability to detect whether someone is gay. Here, too, the confirmations announce themselves. When a person for whatever reason "seems gay" and it is later determined that he is, it is a salient 3 of 12 1/24/08 10:05 AM Some systematic biases of everyday judgment http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19267325.html triumph for one's skill at detection. But people who elude one's gaydar rarely go out of their way to announce, "By the way, I fooled you: I'm gay." At any rate, the notion that people have difficulty invoking relevant comparisons has received support from psychological research. Studies of everyday reasoning have shown that the logic and necessity of control groups, for example, is often lost on a large segment of even the educated population (Boring 1954; Einhorn and Hogarth 1978; Nisbett and Ross 1980). The "Seek and Ye Shall Find" Problem Another common claim that stands up well to empirical research is the idea that people do not assess hypotheses even-handedly. Rather, they tend to seek out confirmatory evidence for what they suspect to be true, a tendency that has the effect of "seek and ye shall find." A biased search for confirmatory information frequently turns up more apparent support for a hypothesis than is justified. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in numerous experiments explicitly designed to assess people's hypothesis-testing strategies (Skov and Sherman 1986; Snyder and Swann 1978). But it is so pervasive that it can also be seen in studies designed with an entirely different agenda in mind. One of my personal favorites is a study in which participants were given the following information (Shafir 1993): Imagine that you serve on the jury of an only-child sole-custody case following a relatively messy divorce. The facts of the case are complicated by ambiguous economic, social, and emotional considerations, and you decide to base your decision entirely on the following few observations. To which parent would you award sole custody of the child? Parent A: average income average health average working hours reasonable rapport with the child relatively stable social life Parent B: above-average income minor health 4 of 12 1/24/08 10:05 AM Some systematic biases of everyday judgment http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19267325.html problems lots of work-related travel very close relationship with the child extremely active social life Faced with this version of the problem, the majority of respondents chose to award custody to Parent B, the "mixed bag" parent who offers several advantages (above-average income), but also some disadvantages (health problems), in comparison to Parent A. In another version of the problem, however, a different group is asked to which parent they would deny custody of the child. Here, too, a majority selects Parent B. Parent B, then, is paradoxically deemed both more and less worthy of caring for the child. The result is paradoxical, that is, unless one takes into account people's tendencies to seek out confirming information. Asked which parent should be awarded the child, people look primarily for positive qualities that warrant being awarded the child - looking less vigilantly for negative characteristics that would lead one to favor the other parent. When asked which parent should be denied custody, on the other hand, people look primarily for negative qualities that would disqualify a parent.
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