Hey Less Wrong,
I'm currently taking a cognitive psychology class, and will be designing and conducting a research project in the field — and I'd like to do it on human judgment, specifically heuristics and biases. I'm currently doing preliminary research to come up with a more specific topic to base my project on, and I figured Less Wrong would be the place to come to find questions about flawed human judgment. So: any ideas?
(I'll probably be using these ideas mostly as guidelines for forming my research question, since I doubt it would be academically honest to take them outright. The study will probably take the form of a questionnaire or online survey, but experimental manipulation is certainly possible and it might be possible to make use of other psych department resources.)
Convert numbers and rates into equivalent traits or dispositions: Convert "85% of the taxis in the city are green" to "85% of previous accidents involved drivers of green cabs". (Recent Kahneman interview)
Requisition social thinking: Convert "85%" to "85 out of 100", or "Which cards must you turn over" to "which people must you check further" (Wason test).
Have people been trained in automatically thinking of "mortality rates" as "survival rates" and such? A good dojo game to play would be practicing thinking in terms of an opposite framing as quickly as possible, until it became pre-conscious, and one consciously became aware of what one heard and its opposite at the same time.
Fresh off the presses at Yale's American Political Science Review from August: http://bullock.research.yale.edu/papers/elite/elite.pdf
(Emphasis mine.)
If one knew the extent one was biased by cues, and one knew one's opinion based on cues and facts, it would be possible to calculate what one's views would be without cues.
Thanks! I knew some of that stuff, but not all. But for the table of thinking errors and debiasing techniques I need the references, too.