Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

I'm planning on doing a presentation on cognitive biases and/or behavioral economics (Kahneman et al) in front of a group of university students (20-30 people). I want to start with a short experiment / demonstration (or two) that will demonstrate to the students that they are, in fact, subject to some bias or failure in decision making. I'm looking for suggestion on what experiment I can perform within 30 minutes (can be longer if it's an interesting and engaging task, e.g. a game), the important thing is that the thing being demonstrated has to be relevant to most people's everyday lives. Any ideas?

I also want to mention that I can get assistants for the experiment if needed.

Edit: Has anyone at CFAR or at rationality minicamps done something similar? Who can I contact to inquire about this?

I've done this in a few small groups, using:

the "this is an attention test" video (aka "how many passes does the team in white make") - always a hit
a calibration exercise just as Larks suggests below, which works pretty well
the Wason card task - some people find it unconvincing "because it's logic" (!)
a "learned helplessness" experiment using impossible anagrams - works so-so
a "priming" experiment where two groups have a phrase-building task with different priming words - my version of that sucks, ne

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3maia14y

For something very brief, anchoring bias is easy to demonstrate and fairly dramatic. I tried this on a friend a couple weeks ago, anchoring her on 1 million people as the population of Ghana; she guessed 900,000. Turned out to be 25 million.

8Larks14y

Get people to give 90% confidence intervals on 10 questions, and then at the end ask "Ok, so who got all 10 within their intervals. 9? That's what you should have got... ok, 8? Still no-one? Ok, how about 7?"