One intellectual rule of thumb on which I rely is that one disagrees with Tyler Cowen at one’s peril. Cowen is an economist at George Mason, and is one of the two bloggers at Marginal Revolution, a very popular blog on economics and culture. So while I won’t call what I’m about to write a …
Tag Archives: psychology
Being told “Be Rational” doesn’t de-bias
More bias research. I’ve been digging in pretty deeply on interventions that help mitigate motivated reasoning and the results aren’t great. There’s self-affirmation, which I discussed in my Atlantic piece, but beyond that it’s pretty thin picking. Motivated reasoning doesn’t track significantly with open-mindedness, and interventions urging participants to be rational seem to have little …
Willpower and belief
I’ve blogged a bunch now about Roy Baumeister’s work on self-control, including the idea that willpower is finite in the short-term, and is depleted throughout the day as you use it. So I feel compelled to post this NYT op-ed claiming something quite different. I don’t know who’s right, but here’s the gist: In research …
Don’t blog on an empty stomach
http://static.bloggingheads.tv/ramon/_live/players/player_v5.2-licensed.swf (The clip above covers some basics of mental energy and depletion.) The alternative title for this post was “I’m hungry; you’re wrong.” I’m not sure which is better… In any case, consider this bit from Kahneman: Resisting this large collection of potential availability biases is possible, but tiresome. You must make the effort to …
Algorithms and the future of divorce
In Chapter 21 of Thinking, Fast and Slow Dan Kahneman discusses the frequent superiority of algorithms over intuition. He documents a wide range of studies showing that algorithms tend to beat expert intuition in areas such as medicine, business, career satisfaction and more. In general, the value of algorithms tends to be in “low-validity environments” …
Fight bias with math
I just finished the chapter in Kahneman’s book on reasoning that dealt with “taming intuitive predictions.” Basically, we make predictions that are too extreme, ignoring regression to the mean, assuming the evidence to be stronger than it is, and ignoring other variables through a phenomenon called “intensity matching.” Here’s an example (not from the book; …
Poverty, culture, economics
If you’re at all interested in the science of willpower, self-control, or decision-making (and I am) you really should read John Tierney’s excellent NYT Magazine piece on the subject. Here’s one nugget: Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people …
So you’re smart, but are you reasonable?
I was searching for this phantom post pointing to research on verbal reasoning scores and bias (I swear I saw it!) when I came across a fascinating a 1997 paper titled Reasoning Independently of Prior Belief and Individual Differences in Actively Open-Minded Thinking. It’s got some neat if perhaps not totally unsurprising conclusions. First, a …
Examples of how media could help overcome bias
I have a piece up at The Atlantic (went up Friday) titled “The Future of Media Bias” that I hope you’ll read. I suppose the title is deliberately misleading, since the topic isn’t media bias in the typical sense. Here’s the premise: Context can affect bias, and on the Web — if I can riff …
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Your memories are bought and paid for
I’ve been reading a lot about cognitive biases lately, for a post I recently finished (that hopefully will be published soon) and I wanted to share a fascinating post only slightly related to that topic, that didn’t make it into my post on the subject. Jonah Lehrer has a characteristically fascinating post at Wired on …
beyond the times 