ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Recognize the shortcuts that quietly shape your judgment.
Implicit subadditivity occurs when the judged probability of an implicit disjunction (e.g., 'not a Democrat') is lower than that of the explicit disjunction (e.g., 'Republican or Independent'). Explicit subadditivity occurs when the probability of an explicit disjunction is less than the sum of its components' probabilities. Unpacking a category inflates probability judgments.
Mutually exclusive and exhaustive events should have probabilities that sum to 1. This entry compares judgments for whole events and their subcategories using political affiliations and trial verdicts.
Grant contrasts impostor syndrome, in which people underestimate their abilities, with armchair quarterback syndrome, in which they overestimate them. Both can make it hard to reconsider a judgment about oneself.
Various approaches from psychology and statistics, such as broadening the search for considerations, decomposing uncertainty, and using calibration data, can help reduce judgmental biases in assessing uncertainty in physical measurements.
The cognitive bias where individuals favor members of their own group over those in other groups, often leading to prejudice, stereotyping, and hostility towards outsiders.
Beliefs learned from culture or past experience can mislead predictions about how an event will feel. Familiarity does not necessarily correct them, because memories of earlier emotions can also be distorted.
Inattentional blindness is the phenomenon where focused attention on a task causes people to miss unexpected but salient stimuli, as demonstrated by the famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment.
Differences in cognitive ability, task interpretation and thinking dispositions can help explain why judgments depart from normative models. The authors argue that computational limits and random errors do not account for all the systematic variation in their research.
Taleb warns that observations from the past may support fragile generalizations when conditions change or variables interact. His critique concerns overconfidence in those generalizations, rather than induction being inherently a cognitive bias.
Search engines infer user intent from the phrasing of queries, leading to biased results that align with the user's implied stance. This can reinforce confirmation bias by returning results that match the positive or negative framing of the query.
The human tendency to react to a person or object based on coincidental associations rather than its intrinsic qualities, often leading to misjudgments in purchases, relationships, and evaluations of messengers.
Information bias is the tendency to seek more information even when it will not change a decision. More information isn’t always better; with less information, people can often predict more accurately.
More information can increase confidence without improving accuracy. Taleb uses image-recognition and forecasting studies to illustrate how early interpretations can persist even as additional details arrive.
The U.S. Navy's introduction of radar and VHF radio during WWII provided excessive information to commanders, causing confusion, delayed decisions, and operational breakdowns—demonstrating that more data can worsen decision-making.
Common cognitive biases that affect how information is processed, including availability, inattention to quality, anchoring, and nonregressive prediction.
People derive belonging and status from group membership, leading to favoritism for their own group and hostility toward rival groups, even when group boundaries are arbitrary.
Speakers anchor in their own intentions and believe their utterances are more transparent than they really are, failing to adjust for the addressee's perspective.
This cognitive bias describes how affective responses (liking/aversion) are often insensitive to objective features like probability or scope, leading to decisions that diverge from rational expected value, as demonstrated by experiments on electric shock avoidance and cold water pain.
Strong emotional reactions to an outcome can make people give too little weight to differences in its probability. Imagining a jackpot or a frightening loss may dominate the decision even when the odds change substantially.
Kahneman reviews studies linking self-control, attention and cognitive performance, including an attention-training experiment with children. He also describes the Cognitive Reflection Test and Stanovich’s distinction between intelligence and the willingness to examine an intuitive answer.
Intergroup bias refers to the tendency to evaluate and treat members of one's own group more favorably than members of other groups, often unconsciously contributing to racism and discrimination.
Intervention bias favors doing something without adequately comparing its benefits and harms with those of waiting. Taleb uses it to question action taken mainly because leaving a problem alone feels unacceptable.
Kahneman contrasts art experts’ intuitive suspicions about a kouros with Gladwell’s account of Harding’s presidential appearance. He argues that intuition can reflect useful cues or question substitution, and that investigators should try to identify the basis of an intuitive judgment.
The inverse problem fallacy occurs when we assume that observed data perfectly represents the underlying distribution, ignoring that many different distributions can produce the same data. This is compounded by preasymptotics, where theories derived from idealized asymptotic conditions fail in real-world, finite-sample settings, especially in domains with fat tails.
Irrational escalation means continuing a commitment because of past investment despite evidence that the next investment is not justified. The relevant comparison is between future costs and benefits, not whether earlier spending can be recovered.
The authors describe Wikipedia’s contributor demographics and efforts to address coverage gaps through edit-a-thons and outreach. Their historical account reports progress while acknowledging substantial remaining imbalances.
The more attempts there are, the more opportunities exist for an impressive result to arise by chance. Evaluating a selected winner requires information about the wider field and the probability of that result under a chance model.
Coincidences, selective data mining, and missing evidence can make luck look like competence. The birthday paradox illustrates how coincidences become more likely as opportunities increase.
Kahneman argues that prediction has limits imposed by the environment. Confidence alone does not establish accuracy, and a predictor’s record and time horizon matter when deciding how much to trust a forecast.
Erikson describes people denying their own resistance to change while readily seeing it in others. Within his personality-color framework, he recommends giving people he calls Greens time, detail, and small steps when introducing changes.
A cognitive bias where people underestimate the likelihood of random encounters or coincidences because they fail to account for the vast number of possible combinations of people, places, and times.
The tendency of System 1 to quickly form judgments based on limited information, which is efficient in familiar or low-stakes situations but risky and error-prone when the context is unfamiliar, stakes are high, or time is short.
The belief that one can determine the truth of a claim through simple logical reasoning or calculation, ignoring the possibility of incomplete or incorrect underlying information. This leads to overconfidence in conclusions and a neglect of expert knowledge.
Keeping an option available has costs: attention, time, and sometimes money. Ariely describes experiments in which participants paid to preserve doors they did not need, illustrating how reluctance to lose an option can interfere with the main goal.
Money can function as a score for achievement and self-worth. The emotional cost of admitting failure or accepting responsibility can then distort decisions about losses, regret, and risk.
People may prefer inaction to avoid the sharper regret of an explicit mistake. The authors suggest this helps explain blackjack players who stand on 16 against a strong dealer upcard despite a basic-strategy recommendation to hit.
Charlie Munger urges investors to question cherished ideas and avoid preventable mistakes. The broader lesson about confirmation bias is to test a favored belief against evidence that could show it is wrong.
People are good at knowing their preferences for familiar options but struggle to predict their preferences for unfamiliar choices. This difficulty in translating choices into experiences leads them to rely on others or limited options to make better decisions.
The psychological law of contagion describes a belief that contact transfers an essence or quality from one person or object to another. Food, clothing, or possessions may serve as intermediaries; the belief can involve physical, mental, or moral qualities.
The law of similarity describes the belief that resembling things share deeper properties or that causes resemble their effects. The article distinguishes like-causes-like reasoning from appearance-equals-reality reactions and relates both to magical thinking and representativeness.
The Law of Small Numbers is a cognitive bias where people believe that small samples are representative of the population, leading to overconfidence in results from small studies. Even experts in statistics often fail to account for sampling variability.
In the reported study, participants used sample-size reasoning less often for subjective choices, such as selecting a class, than for objective questions. A single enjoyable session can outweigh broader evaluations even when the latter provide relevant evidence.
People have a set of intuitive strategies—exposure control, preparation, resistance, remediation, and behavior control—to avoid or undo unwanted influences on their beliefs and emotions, but they often overestimate the effectiveness of later-stage defenses, especially for beliefs, leading to persistent bias.
A mental model describing how people often explain away evidence that contradicts their worldview, and advocating for embracing confusion and curiosity to better understand reality.
Making mistakes is inevitable; the key is to learn to handle them and avoid psychological denial by employing two-track analysis that considers both rational factors and subconscious biases.
Taleb argues that people can learn too narrowly from past surprises, preparing for a repeat of the same event while missing broader weaknesses in their assumptions. He illustrates the point with responses to 9/11 and the Maginot Line.
When predicting the future, people tend to add new technologies and products while ignoring the persistence of old ones. This cognitive bias leads to over-technologized visions and underestimation of enduring tools and practices.
Taleb warns against crediting formal theory for practical advances that preceded it. Trial and error, apprenticeship and working heuristics can produce useful knowledge that later histories make less visible.
Fear of losing respect can lead people to follow familiar practices without checking whether they fit the task. Parrish argues for independent judgment and a willingness to look foolish, while recognizing that an unconventional choice can still be wrong.
A large choice of products or investments can make decisions harder. In some settings, a smaller selection or a well-chosen default helps people decide and improves the choices they make.
Remembered evaluations can give more weight to significant moments and endings than to duration. Kahneman connects this narrative tendency to duration neglect and the peak-end effect in studies of how people judge experiences and entire lives.
This bias describes our tendency to misinterpret the distribution of coincidences, often seeing meaningful patterns in random events and underestimating the likelihood of rare occurrences by chance.
The representativeness heuristic is a cognitive bias where people judge the probability of an event by how similar it is to a typical case, leading to errors like ignoring base rates and false pattern recognition.
We tend to trust, agree with, and do favors for people we like. Factors that increase liking include similarity, physical attractiveness, compliments, cooperation, and reciprocated liking.
The tendency to like or love someone or something leads to ignoring faults, complying with wishes, favoring associated things, and distorting facts to facilitate love. Triggered by admiration, it creates a powerful feedback loop with significant social and personal consequences.
Laboratory studies of judgmental calibration using two-alternative forced-choice (half-range) paradigms confound outcome base rate with task difficulty, obscuring important distinctions in real-world full-range judgments. This reliance limits understanding of how base rates and discriminability separately affect probability estimates.
In the studies described, overestimating how long negative feelings would last appeared more consistently than overestimating positive feelings. The authors propose immune neglect and differences in learning as explanations, while acknowledging that people can also underestimate emotional duration.
The linear extrapolation fallacy is the tendency to assume that a linear trend observed in data will continue indefinitely, ignoring that many phenomena are nonlinear and can curve. This leads to erroneous predictions, such as projecting that all Americans will become overweight by 2048 based on a linear regression of obesity rates.
The linear extrapolation fallacy occurs when trends are projected linearly past natural limits, such as percentages exceeding 100% or impossible values, leading to absurd predictions. This mistake ignores constraints that cause growth to slow or plateau.
A deceptive tactic where websites link to authoritative sources to borrow credibility, even when the linked content contradicts the site's own claims, exploiting readers' tendency to trust prestigious citations without verifying the content.