Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
I think heuristics are underrated. We should discuss heuristics as a society way more than we do. We barely acknowledge heuristics, but if we look closely, they are at the heart of many of our decisions, beliefs, and assumptions. They save us a lot of work and help us move through the world pretty smoothly, … Continue reading Substitution Heuristics
Daniel Kahneman starts one of the chapters in his book Thinking Fast and Slow by writing, "A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. True, you occasionally face a question such as 17 × 24 = ? to which no answer comes immediately to mind, but these dumbfounded moments are … Continue reading Rarely Stumped
One of the successes of System 1, the name Daniel Kahneman uses to describe our quick, intuitive part of the brain in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, is recognizing emotions in people's faces. We don't need much time to study someone's face to recognize that they are happy, scared, or angry. We don't even … Continue reading Judging Faces
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman gives us the somewhat unwieldy acronym WYSIATI - what you see is all there is. The acronym describes a phenomenon that stems from how our brains work. System 1, the name that Kahneman gives to the part of our brain which is automatic, quick, and associative, can only … Continue reading What You See Is All There Is
We like to believe that having more information will make us more confident in our decisions and opinions. The opposite, however, may be true. I have written in the past about a jam study, where participants who selected jam from a sample of a few jams were more happy with their choice than participants who … Continue reading Narrative Confidence
"The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create." Daniel Kahneman writes that in his book Thinking Fast and Slow when discussing the quick conclusions of our System 1, the mental processing part of our brain that is fast, intuitive, and operates based on simple associations … Continue reading System 1 Success
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes a research study that shows the power of the halo effect. The halo effect is the phenomenon where positive traits in a person outshines the negative traits or characteristics of the individual, or cause us to project additional positive traits onto them. For example, think of your … Continue reading First Impressions Matter
A real danger for us, that I don't know how to move beyond, is positive test strategy. It is the search for evidence that confirms what we want to believe or what we think is true. When we already have an intuition about something, we look for examples that support our intuition. Looking for examples … Continue reading Positive Test Strategies
Humans are naturally causal thinkers. We observe things happening in the world and begin to apply a causal reason to them, asking what could have led to the observation we made. We attribute intention and desire to people and things, and work out a narrative that explains why things happened the way they did. … Continue reading Causal Versus Statistical Thinking
Yesterday's post was about our mental structure for seeing causality in the world where there is none. We attribute agency to inanimate objects, imbue them with emotions, attribute intentions, and ascribe goals to objects that don't appear to have any capacity for conscious thought or awareness. From a young age, our minds are built to … Continue reading The Mental Scaffolding of Religious Belief