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.)
Rationality drugs. Many nootropics can increase cognitive capacity, which according to Stanovich's picture of the cognitive science of rationality, should help with performance on some rationality measures. However, good performance on many rationality measures requires not just cognitive capacity but also cognitive reflectiveness: the disposition to choose to think carefully about something and avoid bias. So: Are there drugs that increase cognitive reflectiveness / "need for cognition"?
Debiasing. I'm developing a huge, fully-referenced table of (1) thinking errors, (2) the normative models they violate, (3) their suspected causes, (4) rationality skills that can meliorate them, and (5) rationality exercises that can be used to develop those rationality skills. Filling out the whole thing is of course taking a while, and any help would be appreciated. A few places where I know there's literature but I haven't had time to summarize it yet include: how to debias framing effects, how to debias base rate neglect, and how to debias confirmation bias. (But I have, for example, already summarized everything on how to debias the planning fallacy.)
Do you know of research supporting debiasing scope insensitivity by introducing differences in kind that approximately preserve the subjective quantitative relationship? If not I will look for it, but I don't want to if you already have it at hand.
I am thinking in particular of Project Steve. Rather than counter a list of many scientists who "Dissent from Darwinism" with a list of many scientists who believe evolution works, they made a list of hundreds of scientists named Steve who believe evolution works.
Many people is approximately equal to ma... (read more)