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- By focusing on errors in judgment and decision
making, we can come to understand the way people
make judgments and learn to avoid mistakes.
- Sometimes our judgments are biased because they
are based on misleading information, which can
occur even when the information is encountered
firsthand.
- One bias that can taint information experienced
firsthand is that of pluralistic ignorance, which tends
to arise in situations in which people are reluctant to
express their misgivings about a perceived group
norm, with their reluctance reinforcing the false
norm.
- Although people tend to believe that their memories
are the product of automatic recording devices, in
actuality they are reconstructions based on general
knowledge, abstract theories, and fragments of truly
remembered events. The reconstructive nature of
memory occasionally gives rise to recollections of
events that never occurred.
- Flashbulb memories are powerful images of the
moment when one learned of some dramatic news,
but they too are subject to error, despite the sense of
certainty and vividness attached to them.
- Information received secondhand can also be
biased, as speakers often do not provide a full
account of what happened or may be motivated
(because of ideology or the desire to entertain) to
stress certain elements at the expense of others.
- When people describe events, they tend to sharpen
some elements—that is, emphasize points that are
salient to them and that they think will interest us—
and to level or deemphasize other elements.
- There is evidence that people who watch local newscasts,
with their steady drumbeat of dangerous
events, exaggerate the dangers in their lives.
- How information is presented can also affect judgment.
For example, the order in which information
is presented can be quite important. When the
information presented first is more influential, we
say there is a primacy effect, usually due to the fact
that initial information can affect the way subsequent
information is interpreted. When information
presented last is more influential, we say there
is a recency effect, usually due to the fact that such
information is more likely to be available in
memory.
- Order effects are a type of framing effect. Others
include the "spinning" of information by varying
the structure of the information that is presented to
produce a desired effect in an audience. More subtle
framing effects include whether information is presented
as a potential gain versus a potential loss.
- Knowledge structures, including schemas, influence
our interpretation of information. Knowledge structures
are the top-down tools we use to understand
the world, as opposed to the bottom-up tools of perception
and memory.
- Schemas influence what we attend to, they guide
our inferences and construal of information, and
they direct our memories to recover what seems
relevant.
- The likelihood that a given schema will be applied
to incoming information is a function of the degree
to which information matches the critical features
of the schema. Unfortunately, sometimes the information
available increases the similarity to a schema
but not the appropriateness of applying it.
- Other things being equal, the more recently a
schema has been "activated," the more likely it is to
be applied to new information. It is not at all necessary
that we be consciously aware of a schema in
order to be influenced by it.
- We seem to have two different systems for processing
information: an intuitive, automatic one and a
rational, analytic one. Intuitive responses are based
on rapid, associative processes, whereas rational
processes are based on slower, rule-based reasoning.
- Intuitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts, are useful
and seem to provide us with sound judgments most
of the time, but it is possible to identify several
heuristics that sometimes lead us into errors of
judgment.
- People use the availability heuristic when they judge
the frequency or probability of some event by the
readiness with which relevant instances come to
mind. This can encourage us to overestimate how
much we have contributed to group projects, and it
can lead us to overestimate the risks posed by
salient, memorable hazards like earthquakes and
homicide and to underestimate the likelihood of
silent killers like asthma and stroke.
- People use the representativeness heuristic when they
try to categorize something by judging how similar
it is to their conception of the typical member of the
category, or when they try to make causal attributions
by assessing how similar an effect is to a possible
cause. The strategy is fine as far as it goes. The
problem is that we often overlook highly relevant
considerations such as base-rate information—how
many members of the category there are in a
population.
- The "inside" perspective for making judgments
causes us to make errors such the planning fallacy,
which could be avoided if the individual took an
"outside" perspective, attending to the history of
finishing related tasks in a given time.
- When availability and representativeness operate
together they can produce potent illusory correlations,
which result when people think that two variables
are correlated, both because they resemble one
another and because the co-occurrence of two similar
events is more memorable than the co-occurrence
of two dissimilar events.
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