dspeyer comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Vaniver 02 August 2013 08:59PM

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Comment author: peter_hurford 02 August 2013 01:42:16PM 8 points [-]

This could be studied empirically.

Comment author: dspeyer 04 August 2013 09:29:25PM 4 points [-]

Difficult. The "distance" is metaphorical, and this probably doesn't apply when there's an easy, unambiguous, generally accepted metric. Without that, how do we do the study?

Still, if you have a way, it could be interesting.

Comment author: Document 06 August 2013 03:07:04AM 9 points [-]

In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%.

-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

On the other hand, the book doesn't give a citation, and searching for the exact text of the question turns up only that passage. Not sure what to make of that.

Comment author: Unnamed 06 August 2013 03:33:41AM 16 points [-]

Ross & Sicoly (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.

In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled "primarily wife" and "primarily husband". The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they "found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses." (p. 325)

Comment author: AndHisHorse 04 August 2013 11:14:25PM 3 points [-]

If there is no easy, unambiguous generally accepted metric, that would seem to imply that everyone is a poor judge of distance - making the quote trivially true.