How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
Thomas Gilovich
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0029117062
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life.
When can we trust what we believe—that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"—and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.
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cover story on Mark Spitz had not prevented him from winning seven gold medals in the previous Olympic games). It does not take much statistical sophistication to see how regression effects may be responsible for the belief in the Sports Illustrated jinx. Athletes’ performances at different times are imperfectly correlated. Thus, due to regression alone, we can expect an extraordinarily good performance to be followed, on the average, by a somewhat less extraordinary performance. Athletes appear
people evaluate this kind of information in assessing the presence or strength of such relationships.2 According to this research, although people sometimes perform such “covariation” tasks with considerable accuracy, there are as many or more occasions in which they perform poorly. A major culprit in people’s poor performance seems to be an over-reliance on instances that confirm the existence of a relationship—cells “a” and “d.” In fact, many judgments seem to be influenced almost exclusively
together a set of similarly-flawed investigations does not produce an accurate assessment of reality. As statisticians like to say, sample size does not overcome sample bias. This last lesson is sometimes hard for people to accept. Somehow it just seems that if one conducts enough studies, the flaws should cancel each other out and allow “the truth” to shine through. Like Woody Allen“s Catskills vacationer, people tend to think that sufficient quantity can compensate for a lack of quality. There
true.” The source of this “will to believe” is not hard to fathom. For many people, the existence of ESP implies several comforting corollaries. Most important, it suggests a greater reality which we have yet to fully understand. This can be an extremely seductive “transcendental temptation”27 because it opens up several inviting possibilities, such as the potential for some part of us to survive death. One of the best known parapsychologists, Charles Tart, is quite forthcoming about such a
usual explanation for this remarkable phenomenon involves the alleviation of stress. Couples who adopt, it is said, become less obsessed with their reproductive failure, and their new-found peace of mind boosts their chances for success. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the remarkable phenomenon we need to explain is not why adoption increases a couple’s fertility; clinical research has shown that it does not.1 What needs explanation is why so many people hold this belief
