How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
Thomas Gilovich
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0029117062
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life.
When can we trust what we believe—that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"—and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.
who do not. The evidence relevant to this belief can be represented in the layout at the top of page 31. In this layout, “a” represents the number of couples who adopt and then conceive, “b” represents the number who adopt and do not conceive, etc. To adequately assess whether adoption leads to conception, it is necessary to compare the probability of conception after adopting a/(a+b), with the probability of conception after not adopting, c/(c+d). There is now a large literature on how well
from being in the accepted group serves to artificially raise each person’s score on the outcome criterion. This is depicted by the upward shift in all of the points (from the white to the black dots), and an upward shift in the half-ellipse that tracks these points. The net effect of these two processes is that nearly all of the observations fall in the upper-right quadrant, representing predicted successes that are vindicated by actual success. The observations that might have fallen in the
listener’s attention, telling an entertaining story also accomplishes another common communicative goal: It promotes the speaker’s narrow self-interest. To tell an entertaining story is to be an entertaining person. Doing so enhances the speaker’s public image. But the desire to be seen as an entertaining person is only one kind of self-interest. People pursue a host of more selfish motives in the process of communication, pursuits that may lead them to distort their messages in systematic ways.
uncertain world. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (1982) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and J. Baron (1988) Thinking and deciding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Notes Chapter 1. Introduction 1 E. J. Lamb (1979) Does adoption affect subsequent fertility? American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 134, 138-44. 2 R. M. Dawes (1979) The robust beauty of improper
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