ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Recognize the shortcuts that quietly shape your judgment.
A cognitive bias in project planning where people systematically underestimate completion time and costs because they focus on internal project factors and neglect external uncertainties, a phenomenon called 'tunneling.' Even without incentives, planners are too narrow-minded to account for 'unknown unknowns,' leading to delays and overruns.
A book by Charles Holm that catalogs 25 common cognitive biases, challenging the notion of human rationality.
This chapter discusses the disjunction fallacy—a violation of probability rules where people judge a disjunction (A-or-B) as less likely than one of its constituents, the converse of the well-known conjunction fallacy. Through the Linda problem and other examples, it argues that psychological framing (conjunction vs. disjunction) affects how naturally fallacies occur, with implications for understanding intuitive judgment.
Native advertising adopts the appearance of editorial content. Caulfield and Wineburg argue that this can mislead readers about who paid for a message and weaken the separation between journalism and advertising.
People often infer dispositions from behavior even when situational factors fully explain the behavior, a phenomenon known as the fundamental attribution error. The correction model proposes that dispositional inference involves three stages—categorization, characterization, and correction—with correction being the most effortful and frequently overlooked, especially under cognitive load.
Search results depend partly on how a question is phrased. The authors argue that searches which signal a preferred answer can reinforce confirmation bias, and recommend neutral queries followed by evaluation of the sources.
In an interview collected in Thinking: The New Science of Decision, Simone Schnall describes research on whether physical cleanliness, disgust, and other feelings influence moral judgments. She distinguishes the laboratory studies from proposed applications outside the lab.
Galef argues that scorn can make persuasion harder by leaving a person’s actual concerns unaddressed. When distrust of an institution is central to a disagreement, citing that institution alone may not resolve it.
The above average effect (better-than-average effect) is the tendency for individuals to rate themselves as above average on ambiguous traits, but this may reflect accurate self-assessments based on personal definitions rather than unrealistic bias.
The author explains that despite understanding probability and randomness, he cannot fight his emotional reactions and must accept his predisposition to be fooled by randomness, using practical tricks like avoiding eye contact or imagining others as non-human to manage emotional responses.
Accountability, particularly predecisional accountability to audiences with unknown views, can either reduce or amplify cognitive biases depending on the context. Preemptive self-criticism induced by accountability attenuates biases like the fundamental attribution error and overconfidence, but can amplify biases like ambiguity aversion and the dilution effect when it leads to overintegration of irrelevant information.
In Sweden’s premium pension launch, actively chosen portfolios had higher fees, more equity exposure, and greater concentration in Swedish stocks than the default fund. The case illustrates home bias and the appeal of recent high returns.
People may notice or suspect bias in others more readily than in themselves. They can treat their own intentions and experience as evidence of objectivity while discounting the same explanation from someone else. The passage examines this difference in perceived bias, which is distinct from establishing whose judgment is more accurate.
A cognitive bias where individuals in highly random environments, like financial trading, attribute their success to skill rather than luck, leading to overconfidence and eventual failure when luck runs out.
Adjustment and anchoring is a cognitive bias where people rely too heavily on an initial piece of information (the anchor) when making estimates, and adjustments from that anchor are typically insufficient, leading to biased estimates.
A fund can choose to advertise after a strong run, so advertised performance is a selected sample. Taleb warns that this makes past success harder to interpret: the advertisement alone does not distinguish skill from luck.
Thaler and Sunstein describe fund advertising that emphasized past returns and celebrity endorsements while giving little attention to fees. Their example shows why an advertisement’s persuasive appeal should be assessed separately from its evidence about a fund.
Taleb doubts that philosophical advice alone can teach people to suspend judgment reliably. He argues that evaluations are woven into perception and that people often fail to apply abstract advice under strain.
Advising a friend can make it easier to focus on a decision’s main tradeoffs and put immediate embarrassment or social pressure in perspective. Asking what you would recommend to someone else can provide useful distance from your own choice.
Advocacy is the tendency to take a position and defend it, which can lead to clinging to untrue beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence. This bias reinforces our mind-sets and undermines objective analysis.
People can overestimate how strongly and how long future events will affect their happiness. Taleb emphasizes the failure to learn from earlier forecasts, even after the excitement of a purchase or the distress of a setback has faded.
Affective forecasting means predicting how you will feel; impact bias is overestimating the intensity or duration of that response. In the reported breakup study, forecasts of post-breakup happiness were lower than the happiness reported by participants who had experienced breakups.
In the election study described here, participants whose candidate lost later evaluated the winner more positively than they had expected. The authors treat this as preliminary support for the idea that people underestimate their emotional adaptation.
Counterfactual thinking—imagining alternative outcomes—amplifies emotional responses, especially when the actual outcome is abnormal or easily undone mentally. This leads to stronger feelings of regret, horror, or outrage in situations where a more positive alternative is readily imagined.
Overly precise numbers can be misleading, creating an illusion of accuracy that disguises underlying uncertainty. This bias is common in forecasting, measurement, and decision-making, where exact decimals imply a confidence that the data cannot support.
People tend to equate agreement with intelligence and disagreement with idiocy, a cognitive bias that hinders effective communication and collaboration.
Harrison examines sleep paralysis, suggestive questioning, cultural expectations, and reconstructive memory as explanations for alien-abduction reports. A vivid and sincerely held memory does not by itself establish that the reported event occurred.
The Allais paradox shows a pair of preferences that cannot both be represented by expected utility theory. People may favor a larger, less likely prize in one choice but switch to the smaller prize when its probability becomes certain. The certainty effect offers a psychological explanation for that pattern.
Harrison argues that treatment claims need evidence and that relying on an unproven remedy can cause harm, particularly when it delays effective care. A testimonial, a natural origin, or dissatisfaction with mainstream medicine does not establish that a treatment works.
Why questions are ambiguous because they do not specify the implicit norm or unexpected aspect of the event, leading respondents to interpret the intended focus differently. This ambiguity can explain contrasting attributions observed in social psychology experiments.
In the reported study, self-ratings on positive traits rose as more criteria were available. The analysis found a main effect of criterion condition but no detected interaction with whether traits were positive or negative.
Kahneman uses an imagined vacation that leaves no memories to explore a tension between enjoying an experience and valuing its story afterward. The thought experiment asks how much our choices serve the experiencing self and how much they serve the remembering self.
Jones warns that confidence can remain high even when a conclusion rests largely on conjecture. His problem taxonomy asks analysts to distinguish known facts from judgment and communicate how much uncertainty remains.
Jones argues that combining a group’s analysis can improve judgment, yet members may resist its conclusions when their own views differ. A group’s advantage depends on the task and how its judgments are formed.
Studies suggest that an anchor’s scale and meaning can affect how strongly it influences a judgment. Some reported stronger anchoring when anchor and target matched, but the findings do not establish compatibility as a universal requirement.
Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an initial piece of information (the anchor) heavily influences subsequent judgments, often through priming and selective attention to similarities with the anchor. It is related to confirmation bias, overconfidence, hindsight bias, and preference reversals, but distinct from reference point effects.
Anchoring occurs when an initial value pulls a later estimate toward it. The activation account discussed here proposes that an anchor makes related information easier to retrieve, which can then influence the estimate.
An initial value can pull a numerical estimate toward it. When people generate their own starting point, they may adjust too little; externally supplied anchors can also influence estimates by making compatible information easier to retrieve.
Research demonstrates that when people generate their own anchors (e.g., initial estimates or assumptions) and then adjust from them, the adjustment is often insufficient, leading to biased judgments. This process differs from external anchoring effects and is implicated in phenomena like trait inference, comparative ability estimates, and egocentric biases.
In the study reported here, participants adjusted less from self-generated anchors and answered faster while nodding than while shaking their heads. The authors interpreted the pattern as evidence for an adjustment process distinct from that involved in experimenter-provided anchors.
Insufficient adjustment is one proposed explanation of anchoring: people start from an initial value and do not move far enough from it. The passage reviews evidence for that account and studies showing that anchoring can also occur without adjustment.
Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an initial reference point (anchor) influences subsequent judgments by priming compatible information in memory, even when the anchor is absurd or irrelevant.
An initial number can pull a later estimate toward it, even when the number is arbitrary. Awareness and warnings may not eliminate the effect: the studies described by Wilson et al. (1996) and Quattrone et al. (1981) found that it persisted despite participants being warned.
Anchoring occurs when a salient value pulls a later numerical estimate toward it, even when the value is irrelevant. This account distinguishes insufficient adjustment from self-generated anchors and selective retrieval of information consistent with externally supplied anchors.
We are more influenced by vivid, personal anecdotes than by abstract statistical data, leading to distorted perceptions of risk and probability.
Expert judgment, industry benchmarks, and individual stories offer different kinds of evidence. Combining well-informed forecasts can help, but agreement alone does not establish accuracy. A single anecdote can suggest a question without showing how common or causal a pattern is.
Taleb’s anthropic-bias argument concerns the selection effect in reasoning from our own survival. We can observe only histories that allowed us to exist. Our presence therefore cannot, by itself, show that survival was likely or that our successes required exceptional skill.
Anthropomorphic bias is attributing humanlike characteristics or intentions to something without sufficient grounds. Recognizing pain or agency in another being need not be a mistake; the error is inferring a humanlike mind from limited evidence.
Anticipatory regret is the anticipation of psychological pain from a potential negative outcome that influences decision-making, leading people to avoid actions that could cause regret, even if the probability of a negative outcome is not overestimated.
Taleb criticizes the prestige given to Gaussian-based risk models through the economics prize and business education. He argues that institutional acceptance can spread a theory despite failures to represent extreme financial risks.
Psychologists may misapply normative models from disciplines like statistics and logic when interpreting experimental responses, leading to erroneous claims of cognitive bias. Critics argue that researchers, not subjects, often misunderstand the logic of the problem.
Initial prices, even if arbitrary, become anchors that shape our willingness to pay for that product and related products, creating a coherent pattern of decisions influenced by the first imprint.
The authors distinguish reports of enduring attitudes from reports of what someone is experiencing now. They argue that participants sincerely reported feeling better than forecast, while leaving open whether sincere reports of current experience can be judged wrong.
The logical fallacy of concluding that a claim is false because it seems personally unbelievable, including dismissing wrongdoing solely because you trust the person involved.
Confirmation bias can turn information gathering into a search for reassurance. Specific questions about problems can help when someone has an incentive to conceal them; open-ended questions can help when your authority or assumptions might steer the answer. Choose questions with the likely source of missing information in mind.
Taleb uses the label Asperger Probability for his argument that rigid systematizing can obscure differences in knowledge and exposure to extreme events. His financial anecdote does not establish a clinical link between autism and risk blindness.
People often see themselves as less biased than others. This gap can reflect underestimating their own susceptibility, overestimating others’ bias, or both. The studies described here also show that people can predict others accurately while being overly optimistic about themselves.
Historical measurements of fundamental physical constants often underestimate true uncertainty, leading to errors that can be disconcertingly large relative to reported error bars. Examples include Millikan's oil-drop experiment and CP violation measurements, highlighting the need for subjective judgment and awareness of cognitive biases.
An intuitive response based on associations can persist alongside a conflicting analytic judgment. The source discusses evidence for these different routes to a judgment.
Taleb recalls Beirut’s wartime blackouts and questions assurances of stability. He uses a comparison with astronomical equilibrium to express doubt about assuming that an apparently stable system will remain so.