Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
Our experiences and narratives are extremely important to consider when we make judgments about the world, however we rarely think deeply about the reasons why we hold the beliefs we do. We rarely pause to consider whether our opinions are biased, whether our limited set of experiences shape the narratives that play in our mind, … Continue reading Fluency of Ideas
I entered a Master's in Public Administration program at the University of Nevada in 2016. I started the same semester as the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. I was drawn toward public policy because I love science, because I have always wanted to better understand how people come to hold political beliefs, and because … Continue reading Why We Talk About Human Nature
Risk is a tricky thing to think about, and how we chose to measure and communicate risk can make it even more challenging to comprehend. Our brains like to categorize things, and categorization is easiest when the categories are binary or represent three or fewer distinct possibilities. Once you start adding options and different possible … Continue reading How We Chose to Measure Risk
It feels weird to acknowledge that the model for reality within our brains is nothing more than a model. It is a construction of what constitutes reality based on our experiences and based on the electrical stimuli that reach our brain from various sensory organs, tissues, and nerve endings. The brain doesn't have a model … Continue reading The Emotional Replica of Reality Within Our Brains
When it comes to the availability heuristic, fluency seems to be the most important factor. The ease with which an example of something comes to mind matters more than the real world frequency of the event. Salient examples of people being pulled over by the police, of celebrity divorces, or of wildfires cause our brains … Continue reading Fluency Versus Frequency
Yesterday I wrote about the Availability Heuristic, the term that Daniel Kahneman uses in his book Thinking Fast and Slow to describe the ways in which our brains misjudge frequency, amount, and probability based on how easily an example of something comes to mind. In his book, Kahneman describes individuals being more likely to overestimate … Continue reading Thinking About Who Deserves Credit for Good Teamwork
Which presidential candidate is doing more advertising this year? Which college football team has been the most dominant over the last five years? Who has had the most songs on the Hot 100 over the last five years? You can probably come up with an intuitive answer to (at least one of) these questions even … Continue reading The Science of Availability
"The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense … Continue reading The Environment of the Moment
Anchoring effects were one of the psychological phenomenon that I found the most interesting in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. In many situations in our lives, random numbers seem to be able to influence other numbers that we consciously think about, even when there is no reasonable connection between the random number we … Continue reading Anchoring Effects
Our brains are built to think causally and look for patterns. We benefit when we can recognize that some foods make us feel sick, when certain types of clouds mean rain is on the way, or when our spouse gives us a certain look that means they are getting frustrated with something. Being able to … Continue reading Detecting Rules