The Outside View's Domain
Followup to: The Planning Fallacy
Plato's Phaedo:
"The state of sleep is opposed to the state of waking; and out of sleeping, waking is generated; and out of waking, sleeping; and the process of generation is in the one case falling asleep, and in the other waking up. Do you agree?"
"Quite."
"Then suppose that you analyze life and death to me in the same manner. Is not death opposed to life?"
"Yes."
"And they are generated one from the other?"
"Yes."
"What is generated from life?"
"Death."
"And what from death?"
"I can only say in answer - life."
"Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated from the dead?"
"That is clear."
"Then our souls exist in the house of Hades."
"It seems so."
Now suppose that the foil in the dialogue had objected a bit more strongly, and also that Plato himself had known about the standard research on the Inside View vs. Outside View...
(As I disapprove of Plato's use of Socrates as his character mouthpiece, I shall let one of the characters be Plato; and the other... let's call him "Phaecrinon".)
Scarcity
What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I own three copies of this book, one for myself, and two for loaning to friends.
Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.
- If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one. If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other. (Brehm and Weintraub 1977.)
- When Dade County forbade use or possession of phosphate detergents, many Dade residents drove to nearby counties and bought huge amounts of phosphate laundry detergents. Compared to Tampa residents not affected by the regulation, Dade residents rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective, more powerful on stains, and even believed that phosphate detergents poured more easily. (Mazis 1975, Mazis et. al. 1973.)
Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
Followup to: Similarity Clusters
Birds fly. Well, except ostriches don't. But which is a more typical bird—a robin, or an ostrich?
Which is a more typical chair: A desk chair, a rocking chair, or a beanbag chair?
Most people would say that a robin is a more typical bird, and a desk chair is a more typical chair. The cognitive psychologists who study this sort of thing experimentally, do so under the heading of "typicality effects" or "prototype effects" (Rosch and Lloyd 1978). For example, if you ask subjects to press a button to indicate "true" or "false" in response to statements like "A robin is a bird" or "A penguin is a bird", reaction times are faster for more central examples. (I'm still unpacking my books, but I'm reasonably sure my source on this is Lakoff 1986.) Typicality measures correlate well using different investigative methods—reaction times are one example; you can also ask people to directly rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how well an example (like a specific robin) fits a category (like "bird").
So we have a mental measure of typicality—which might, perhaps, function as a heuristic—but is there a corresponding bias we can use to pin it down?
Well, which of these statements strikes you as more natural: "98 is approximately 100", or "100 is approximately 98"? If you're like most people, the first statement seems to make more sense. (Sadock 1977.) For similar reasons, people asked to rate how similar Mexico is to the United States, gave consistently higher ratings than people asked to rate how similar the United States is to Mexico. (Tversky and Gati 1978.)
And if that still seems harmless, a study by Rips (1975) showed that people were more likely to expect a disease would spread from robins to ducks on an island, than from ducks to robins. Now this is not a logical impossibility, but in a pragmatic sense, whatever difference separates a duck from a robin and would make a disease less likely to spread from a duck to a robin, must also be a difference between a robin and a duck, and would make a disease less likely to spread from a robin to a duck.
Zut Allais!
Continuation of: The Allais Paradox
Huh! I was not expecting that response. Looks like I ran into an inferential distance.
It probably helps in interpreting the Allais Paradox to have absorbed more of the gestalt of the field of heuristics and biases, such as:
- Experimental subjects tend to defend incoherent preferences even when they're really silly.
- People put very high values on small shifts in probability away from 0 or 1 (the certainty effect).
The Allais Paradox
Followup to: But There's Still A Chance Right?, Beautiful Probability
Choose between the following two options:
1A. $24,000, with certainty.
1B. 33/34 chance of winning $27,000, and 1/34 chance of winning nothing.
Which seems more intuitively appealing? And which one would you choose in real life?
Asch's Conformity Experiment
Solomon Asch, with experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since, highlighted a phenomenon now known as "conformity". In the classic experiment, a subject sees a puzzle like the one in the nearby diagram: Which of the lines A, B, and C is the same size as the line X? Take a moment to determine your own answer...
The gotcha is that the subject is seated alongside a number of other people looking at the diagram—seemingly other subjects, actually confederates of the experimenter. The other "subjects" in the experiment, one after the other, say that line C seems to be the same size as X. The real subject is seated next-to-last. How many people, placed in this situation, would say "C"—giving an obviously incorrect answer that agrees with the unanimous answer of the other subjects? What do you think the percentage would be?
The Robbers Cave Experiment
Did you ever wonder, when you were a kid, whether your inane "summer camp" actually had some kind of elaborate hidden purpose—say, it was all a science experiment and the "camp counselors" were really researchers observing your behavior?
Me neither.
But we'd have been more paranoid if we'd read Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment by Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, and Sherif (1954/1961). In this study, the experimental subjects—excuse me, "campers"—were 22 boys between 5th and 6th grade, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each other as the researchers could manage.
The experiment, conducted in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, was meant to investigate the causes—and possible remedies—of intergroup conflict. How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and—
—and that turned out to be quite sufficient.
The Halo Effect
The affect heuristic is how an overall feeling of goodness or badness contributes to many other judgments, whether it's logical or not, whether you're aware of it or not. Subjects told about the benefits of nuclear power are likely to rate it as having fewer risks; stock analysts rating unfamiliar stocks judge them as generally good or generally bad—low risk and high returns, or high risk and low returns—in defiance of ordinary economic theory, which says that risk and return should correlate positively.
The halo effect is the manifestation of the affect heuristic in social psychology. Robert Cialdini, in Influence: Science and Practice, summarizes:
Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence (for a review of this evidence, see Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991). Furthermore, we make these judgments without being aware that physical attractiveness plays a role in the process. Some consequences of this unconscious assumption that "good-looking equals good" scare me. For example, a study of the 1974 Canadian federal elections found that attractive candidates received more than two and a half times as many votes as unattractive candidates (Efran & Patterson, 1976). Despite such evidence of favoritism toward handsome politicians, follow-up research demonstrated that voters did not realize their bias. In fact, 73 percent of Canadian voters surveyed denied in the strongest possible terms that their votes had been influenced by physical appearance; only 14 percent even allowed for the possibility of such influence (Efran & Patterson, 1976). Voters can deny the impact of attractiveness on electability all they want, but evidence has continued to confirm its troubling presence (Budesheim & DePaola, 1994).
Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism
Followup to: Evaluability
"Psychophysics", despite the name, is the respectable field that links physical effects to sensory effects. If you dump acoustic energy into air—make noise—then how loud does that sound to a person, as a function of acoustic energy? How much more acoustic energy do you have to pump into the air, before the noise sounds twice as loud to a human listener? It's not twice as much; more like eight times as much.
Acoustic energy and photons are straightforward to measure. When you want to find out how loud an acoustic stimulus sounds, how bright a light source appears, you usually ask the listener or watcher. This can be done using a bounded scale from "very quiet" to "very loud", or "very dim" to "very bright". You can also use an unbounded scale, whose zero is "not audible at all" or "not visible at all", but which increases from there without limit. When you use an unbounded scale, the observer is typically presented with a constant stimulus, the modulus, which is given a fixed rating. For example, a sound that is assigned a loudness of 10. Then the observer can indicate a sound twice as loud as the modulus by writing 20.
And this has proven to be a fairly reliable technique. But what happens if you give subjects an unbounded scale, but no modulus? 0 to infinity, with no reference point for a fixed value? Then they make up their own modulus, of course. The ratios between stimuli will continue to correlate reliably between subjects. Subject A says that sound X has a loudness of 10 and sound Y has a loudness of 15. If subject B says that sound X has a loudness of 100, then it's a good guess that subject B will assign loudness in the range of 150 to sound Y. But if you don't know what subject C is using as their modulus—their scaling factor—then there's no way to guess what subject C will say for sound X. It could be 1. It could be 1000.
For a subject rating a single sound, on an unbounded scale, without a fixed standard of comparison, nearly all the variance is due to the arbitrary choice of modulus, rather than the sound itself.
"Hm," you think to yourself, "this sounds an awful lot like juries deliberating on punitive damages. No wonder there's so much variance!" An interesting analogy, but how would you go about demonstrating it experimentally?
Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping)
Followup to: The Affect Heuristic
With the expensive part of the Hallowthankmas season now approaching, a question must be looming large in our readers' minds:
"Dear Overcoming Bias, are there biases I can exploit to be seen as generous without actually spending lots of money?"
I'm glad to report the answer is yes! According to Hsee (1998)—in a paper entitled "Less is better: When low-value options are valued more highly than high-value options"—if you buy someone a $45 scarf, you are more likely to be seen as generous than if you buy them a $55 coat.
This is a special case of a more general phenomenon. An earlier experiment, Hsee (1996), asked subjects how much they would be willing to pay for a second-hand music dictionary:
- Dictionary A, from 1993, with 10,000 entries, in like-new condition.
- Dictionary B, from 1993, with 20,000 entries, with a torn cover and otherwise in like-new condition.
The gotcha was that some subjects saw both dictionaries side-by-side, while other subjects only saw one dictionary...
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