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.)
Any situation where people make decisions and have a theory of how they make the decision, they can be systematically wrong. This includes people predicting what they would do in a set of future circumstances.
This is an easier form of irrationality to break ground in than preferences of A>B, B>C, C>A.
Another trope in such experiments is having subjects predict things about average people and also about themselves.
One research technique to be aware of is the one where questionnaires are handed out with a die, and respondents are instructed to roll it for every answer, and always answer "yes" on a roll of six and "no" on a roll of one, regardless of the true answer to that question. I forget what it and its variants are called.