Category: Daniel Kahneman – Thinking Fast and Slow

Narratives and Halos

Narratives and Halos

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about narrative fallacies and how our brains’ desires to create coherent stories can lead to cognitive errors. One error, which I wrote about previously, is the halo effect, and in some ways it is a direct consequence of narrative thinking. Our brains don’t do well with conflicting information that doesn’t fit a coherent narrative, and the halo effect helps smooth over this problem in our minds.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes, “The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simply and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations; good people do only good things and bad people are all bad.” When we already like someone or consider them a good person the halo effect will simplify other judgments that we might have to make about them. If the person we admire is wearing a particular kind of coat, then we will assume that it is also a coat we should admire. If a person we dislike is engaging in some type of business, then we will assume that business is also bad. Contradictions occur when we see someone we admire wearing clothing we don’t find acceptable or when a person we know to have moral flaws engages in altruistic charity work.

 

Instead of accepting a contradiction in our narrative, creating a more complex story where some people are good in some situations but bad in others, we alter our judgments in other ways to maintain a coherent narrative. The person we like wearing strange clothes is a trend setter, and that must be the new up-and-coming style we should try to emulate. The bad person engaged in charity isn’t really doing the good things for good reasons, rather they are being selfish and trying to show-off through their charity.

 

When we reflect on our thinking and try to be more considerate of the narratives we create, we can see that we fall into traps like the halo effect. What is harder to do, however, is overcome the halo effect and other cognitive errors that simplify our narratives once we have noticed them. It is hard to continually live with conflicting opinions, ideas of people, cities, sports teams, car companies, and shoe brands. It is much easier to adopt a few favorites and believe them to be a good in all ways, rather than to accept that something might be great in some ways, but harmful or disappointing in others.
Narrative Fallacies #NarrativePolicyFramework

Narrative Fallacies

Posted on by jabittan
With perhaps the exception of professional accountants and actuaries, we think in narratives. How we understand important aspects of our lives, such as who we are, the opportunities we have had in life, the decisions we have made, and how our society works is shaped by the narratives we create in our minds. We use stories to make sense of our relationships with other people, of where our future is heading, and to motivate ourselves to keep going. Narratives are powerful, but so are the narrative fallacies that can arise from the way we think.

 

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, demonstrates the ways in which our brains take short-cuts, rely on heuristics, and create narratives to understand a complex world. He shows he these thinking strategies can fail us in predictable ways due to biases, illusions, and judgments made on incomplete information. Narrative fallacies can arise from all three of the cognitive errors I just listed. To get more in depth with narrative fallacies, Kahneman writes,

 

“Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.”

 

We don’t really know how to judge probabilities, possibilities, and the consequences of things that didn’t happen. We are biased to see agency in people and things when luck was more of a factor than any direct action or individual decision. We are motivated and compelled by stories of the world that simplify the complexity of reality, taking a small slice of the world and turning that into a model to describe how we should live, behave, and relate to others.

 

Unfortunately, in my opinion, narrative fallacies cannot be avoided. I studied public policy, and one of the frameworks for understanding political decision-making that I think needs far more direct attention is the Narrative Policy Framework which incorporates the idea of Social Constructions of Target Populations from Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram. We understand the outcomes of an event based on how we think about the person or group that were impacted by the consequences of the outcome. A long prison sentence for a person who committed a violent crime is fair and appropriate. A tax break for parents who work full time is also fair and appropriate. In both instances, we think about the person receiving the punishment or reward of a decision, and we judge whether they are deserving of the punishment or reward. We create a narrative to explain why we think the outcomes are fair.

 

We cannot exist in a large society of millions of people without shared narratives to help us explain and understand our society collectively. We cannot help but create a story about a certain person or group of people, and build a narrative to explain why we think that person or group deserves a certain outcome. No matter what, however, the outcomes will not be rational, they will be biased and contain contradictions. We will judge groups positively or negatively based on stories that may or may not be accurate and complete, and people will face real rewards or punishments due to how we construct our narratives and what biases are built into our stories. We can’t escape this reality because it is how our brains work and how we create a cohesive society, but we can at least step back and admit this is how our brains work, admit that our narratives are subject to biases and are based on incomplete information, and we can decide how we want to move forward with new narratives that will help to unify our societies rather than pit them against each other in damaging competition.
Intensity Matching and Intuitive Predictions

Intuitive Predictions and Intensity Matching

Posted on by jabittan
“Intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence,” writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow. A lot of our thinking takes place in the part of our brain which is good at making quick connections, quickly detecting patterns, and making fast judgments. The deeper and more thoughtful part of our brain only engages with the world when it really needs to, when we really need to do some critical thinking to sort out a math problem, write a blog post, or figure out how to grind down some grains to make bread. The result is that a lot of our thinking processes happen at a quick and intuitive level that is subject to biases and assumptions based on incomplete information.  When we do finally turn our critical thinking brain to a problem, it is only operating with a limited set of information from the quick part of our brain which scanned the environment and grabbed the information which stood out.

 

When we make a prediction without sitting down and doing some math or weighing the factors that influence our prediction with pen and paper, our predictions will seem logical, but will miss critical information. We will make connections between ideas and experiences that might not be very reflective of the actual world. We will simplify the prediction by answering easy questions and substituting answers for the more difficult question that our prediction is trying to answer.

 

This year, as in 2016, we will see this in action. In 2016, for me and many of the people I know, it seemed as though very few people supported Donald Trump for president. I saw very few bumper stickers or yard signs for Trump, all the social media posts I saw highlighted his worst moments, and the news coverage I consumed described why he was unfit to be president. Naturally enough, I believed he would lose in a landslide. Of course, that did not happen. Intuitively I was sure that Clinton would win, and Kahneman’s research helps explain why I should have been more skeptical of my natural intuition.

 

Part of the problem was that my intuitive prediction was an exercise of intensity matching, and as Kahneman writes, “Intensity matching yields predictions that are as extreme as the evidence on which they are based.” All the information I saw highlighted how terrible Trump was. I didn’t see a lot of people supporting trump, I didn’t see news stories justifying his candidacy. I didn’t see people in my immediate environment who strongly supported him, so my intuition was biased. It didn’t help that I didn’t do anything to seek out people who did support him or information outlets that posted articles or stories in support of him.

 

Kahneman’s writing aligns with my real world experience. His studies of the brain and of our predictive machinery reveals biases and errors in our thinking. Our intuition is based on a limited set of information that the quick part of our brain can put together. When we do engage our deep thinking brain, it can still only operate on that limited information, so even if we do think critically, we are likely to still make mistakes because we can’t see the full picture and biases in the information we absorb will predictably shape the direction of our miscalculations. What might feel natural and obvious to us could be a result of faulty intensity matching and random chance in the environment around us.
Regression to the Mean Versus Causal Thinking

Regression to the Mean Versus Causal Thinking

Posted on by jabittan
Regression to the mean, the idea that there is an average outcome that can be expected and that overtime individual outliers from the average will revert back toward that average, is a boring phenomenon on its own. If you think about it in the context of driving to work and counting your red lights, you can see why it is a rather boring idea. If you normally hit 5 red lights, and one day you manage to get to work with just a single red light, you probably expect that the following day you won’t have as much luck with the lights, and will probably have more red lights than than your lucky one red light commute. Conversely, if you have a day where you manage to hit every possible red light, you would probably expect to have better traffic luck the next day and be somewhere closer to your average. This is regression to the mean. Simply because you had only one red or managed to hit every red one day doesn’t cause the next day’s traffic light stoppage to be any different, but you know you will probably have a more average count of reds versus greens – no causal explanation involved, just random traffic light luck.

 

But for some reason this idea is both fascinating and hard to grasp in other areas, especially if we think that we have some control of the outcome. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman helps explain why it is so difficult in some settings for us to accept regression to the mean, what is otherwise a rather boring concept. He writes,

 

“Our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with mere statistics. When our attention is called to an event, associative memory will look for its cause – more precisely, activation will automatically spread to any cause that is already stored in memory. Causal explanations will be evoked when regression is detected, but they will be wrong because the truth is that regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.”

 

Unless you truly believe that there is a god of traffic lights who rules over your morning commute, you probably don’t assign any causal mechanism to your luck with red lights. But when you are considering how well a professional golfer played on the second day of a tournament compared to the first day, or when you are considering whether intelligent women marry equally intelligent men, you are likely to have some causal idea that comes to mind. The golfer was more or less complacent on the second day – the highly intelligent women have to settle for less intelligent men because the highly intelligent men don’t want an intellectual equal. These are examples that Kahneman uses in the book and present plausible causal mechanisms, but as Kahneman shows, the more simple though boring answer is simply regression to the mean. A golfer who performs spectacularly on day one is likely to be less lucky on day two. A highly intelligent woman is likely to marry a man with intelligence closer to average just by statistical chance.

 

When regression to the mean violates our causal expectation it becomes an interesting and important concept. It reveals that our minds don’t simply observe an objective reality, they observe causal structures that fit with preexisting narratives. Our causal conclusions can be quite inaccurate, especially if they are influenced by biases and prejudices that are unwarranted. If we keep regression to the mean in mind, we might lose some of our exciting narratives, but our thinking will be more sound, and our judgments more clear.
Regression to the Mean

Praise, Punishment, & Regression to the Mean

Posted on by jabittan
Regression to the mean is seriously underrated. In sports, stock market funds, and biological trends like generational height differences, regression to the mean is a powerful, yet misunderstood phenomenon. A rookie athlete may have a standout first year, only to perform less spectacularly the following year. An index fund may outperform all others one year, only to see other funds catch up the next year. And a tall man may have a son who is shorter. In each instance, regression to the mean is at play, but since we underrate it, we assume there is some causal factor causing our athlete to play worse (it went to his head!), causing our fund to earn less (they didn’t rebalance the portfolio correctly!), and causing our son to be shorter (his father must have married a short woman).

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman looks at the consequences that arise when we fail to understand regression to the mean and attempt to create causal connections between events when we shouldn’t. Kahneman describes an experiment he conducted with Air Force cadets, asking them to flip a coin backwards over their head and try to hit a spot on the floor. Those who had a good first shot typically did worse on their second shot. Those who did poor on their first shot, usually did better the next time. There wasn’t any skill involved, the outcome was mostly just luck and random chance, so if someone was close one time, you might expect their next shot to be a little further out, just by random chance. This is regression to the mean in an easy to understand example.

 

But what happens when we don’t recognize regression to the mean in a random and simplified experiment? Kahneman used the cadets to demonstrate how random performance deviations from the mean during flight maneuvers translates into praise or punishments for the cadets. Those who performed well were often praised, only to regress to  the mean on their next flight and perform worse. Those who performed poorly also regressed to the mean, but in an upward direction, improving on the next flight. Those whose initial performance was poor received punishment (perhaps just a verbal reprimand) between their initial poor effort and follow-up improvement (regression).  Kahneman describes the take-away from the experiment this way:

 

“The feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”

 

Praise a cadet who performed well, and they will then perform worse. Criticize a cadet who performed poorly, and they will do better. Our minds overfit patterns and start to see a causal link between praise and subsequent poor performance and castigation and subsequent improvement. All that is really happening is that we are misunderstanding regression to the mean, and creating a causal model where we should not.

 

If we better understood regression to the mean, we wouldn’t be so shocked when a standout rookie sports star appears to have a sophomore slump. We wouldn’t jump on the bandwagon when an index fund had an exceptional year, and we wouldn’t be surprised by phenotypical regression to the mean from one generation to the next. Our brains are phenomenal pattern recognizing machines, but sometimes they see the wrong pattern, and sometimes that gives us perverse incentives for how we behave and interact with each other. The solution is to step back from individual cases and try to look at an average over time. By gathering more data and looking for longer lasting trends we can better identify regression to the mean versus real trends in performance over time.
Valid Stereotypes

Valid Stereotypes?

Posted on by jabittan
Arguments about stereotypes are common in the world today. In the United States we have worked very hard to push back against stereotypes by bringing them into view so that we can address them directly to dispel incorrect and harmful prejudices. In the circles I am usually a part of, eliminating stereotypes is universally applauded, and people who reveal an inner stereotype, even if harmless, are often castigated for applying a characteristic or trait to an entire group of people and failing to recognize diversity and randomness within a group of people.

 

What I almost never hear, at least among the circles I am a part of, is that stereotypes can have validity and help improve some level of judgment. However, Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow suggests that maybe we should acknowledge some valid and helpful stereotypes. He writes,

 

“The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.”

 

I have a couple of thoughts in response to the quote from Kahneman. First, is about the way in which rejecting stereotypes that helps with judgment makes society more cohesive, and the second is about how we can use stereotypes to actually make the world more inclusive.

 

First, Kahneman states that society has become more equal and more civilized with stereotype rejection. The benefits of rejecting stereotypes comes from rejecting invalid stereotypes – prejudices that outcast other people and groups as inferior and inadequate. When we throw out stereotypes, we eliminate a lot of barriers from prejudices, even if it makes some roles and interactions with people who are not like us a little more challenging. The cost, as Kahneman notes, of abandoning stereotypes is that we have a little more friction in some of our interactions with others, but through deliberate effort this can be overcome and reduced.

 

The second note, is that embracing some valid stereotypes can help us have a better world. My initial thought in this regard is bright colored sand-paper strips at the edge of stairs. Many public buildings will add a strip of sand-paper like material, often bright yellow or a contrasting color, to the edge of stairs in public walkways. We might stereotype senior citizens or people with vision disorders and assume they need extra help walking up stairs, and we might be correct in these stereotypes. The stereotypes can become valid if they enable us to build a better world and accurately reflect the reality of the people we are making assumptions or pre-judgments about. The end result, if we embrace the stereotype instead of dismissing or ignoring it, is that we build staircases that are more safe and actually better for everyone. Able bodied young people will also benefit from stairs that are responsive to stereotypical concerns about the elderly. Perhaps this isn’t what Kahneman is referring to in his thoughts of valid stereotypes, perhaps this is just good design of the built world, but I think it can be considered a way of using stereotypes in a positive direction.

 

In most instances, our stereotypes have been negative factors that outcast people who are not like us, and serve to create more social animosity among people. Certainly these stereotypes should be discarded, however, Kahneman would argue that some stereotypes can be valid, and we can use them to construct more inclusive and overall better worlds for ourselves and others. There is a cost to ignoring all stereotypes, even if ignoring the vast majority of stereotypes actually is helpful for our societies.
Base Rates Joe Abittan

Base Rates

Posted on by jabittan
When we think about individual outcomes we usually think about independent causal structures. A car accident happened because a person was switching their Spotify playlist and accidently ran a red light. A person stole from a grocery store because they had poor moral character which came from a poor cultural upbringing. A build-up of electrical potential from the friction of two air masses rushing past each other caused a lightning strike.

 

When we think about larger systems and structures we usually think about more interconnected and somewhat random outcomes that we don’t necessarily observe on a case by case basis, but instead think about in terms of likelihoods and conditions which create the possibilities for a set of events and outcomes. Increasing technological capacity in smartphones with lagging technological capacity in vehicles created a tension for drivers who wanted to stream music while operating vehicles, increasing the chances of a driver error accident. A stronger US dollar made it more profitable for companies to employ workers in other countries, leading to a decline in manufacturing jobs in US cities and people stealing food as they lost their paychecks.  Earth’s tilt toward the sun led to a difference in the amount of solar energy that northern continental landmasses experienced, creating a temperature and atmospheric gradient which led to lightning producing storms and increased chances of lightning in a given region.

 

What I am trying to demonstrate in the two paragraphs above is a tension between thinking statistically versus thinking causally. It is easy to think causally on a case by case basis, and harder to move up the ladder to think about statistical likelihoods and larger outcomes over entire complex systems. Daniel Kahneman presents these two types of thought in his book Thinking Fast and Slow writing:

 

“Statistical base rates are facts about a population to which a case belongs, but they are not relevant to the individual case. Causal base rates change your view of how the individual case came to be.”

 

It is more satisfying for us to assign agency to a single individual than to consider that individual’s actions as being part of a large and complex system that will statistically produce a certain number of outcomes that we observe. We like easy causes, and dislike thinking about statistical likelihoods of different events.

 

“Statistical base rates are generally underweighted, and sometimes neglected altogether, when specific information about the case at hand is available.
Causal base rates are treated as information about the individual case and are easily combined with other case-specific information.”

 

The base rates that Kahneman describes can be thought of as the category or class to which we assign something. We can use different forms of base rates to support different views and opinions. Shifting the base rate from a statistical base rate to a causal base rate may change the way we think about whether a person is deserving of punishment, or aid, or indifference. It may change how we structure society, design roads, and conduct cost-benefit analyses for changing programs or technologies. Looking at the world through a limited causal base rate will give us a certain set of outcomes that might not generalize toward the rest of the world, and might cause us to make erroneous judgments about the best ways to organize ourselves to achieve the outcomes we want for society.
Availability Cascades

Availability Cascades

Posted on by jabittan
This morning, while reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, I came across an idea that was new to me. Harari writes, “Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. … Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it.”  The idea is that chaotic systems, like societies and cultures, are distinct from chaotic systems like the weather. We can model the weather, and it won’t change based on what we forecast. When we model elections, on the other hand, there is a chance that people, and ultimately the outcome of the election, will be influenced by the predictions we make.  The chaos is responsive to the way we think about that chaos. A hurricane doesn’t care where we think it is going to make landfall, but voters in a state may care quite a bit and potentially change their behavior if they think their state could change the outcome of an election.

 

This ties in with the note from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow which I had selected to write about today. Kahneman writes about availability cascades in his book, and they are a piece of the feedback mechanism described by Harari in level two chaos systems. Kaneman writes:

 

“An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. One some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried.”

 

We can think about any action or event that people and governments might take as requiring a certain action potential in order to take place. A certain amount of energy, interest, and attention is required for social action to take place. The action potential can be small, such as a red light being enough of an impetus to cause multiple people to stop their cars at an intersection, or monumental, such as a major health crisis being necessary to spur emergency financial actions from the Federal Government. Availability cascades create a set of triggers which can enhance the energy, interest, and attention provided to certain events and bolster the likelihood of a public response.

 

2020 has been a series of extreme availability cascades. With a global pandemic, more people are watching news more closely than before. This allows for the increased salience of incident of police brutality, and increases the energy in the public response to such incidents. As a result, more attention has been paid to racial injustice, and large companies have begun to respond in new ways to issues of race and equality, again heightening the energy and interest of the public in demanding action regarding both racial justice and police policy. There are other ways that events could have played out, but availability cascades created feedback mechanisms within a level two chaotic system, opening certain avenues for public and societal action.

 

It is easy to look back and make assessments on what happened, but in the chaos of the moment it is hard to understand what is going on. Availability cascades help describe what we see, and help us think about what might be possible in the future.
Affect Heuristics

More on Affect Heuristics

Posted on by jabittan
For me, one of the easiest examples of heuristics that Daniel Kahneman shares in his book Thinking Fast and Slow is the affect heuristic. It is a bias that I know I fall into all the time, and that has led me to buy particular brands of shoes, has influenced how I think about certain foods, and has shaped the way I think about people. In his book Kahenman writes, “The affect heuristic is an instances of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think About it?).”

 

The world is a complex and tricky place, and we can only focus a lot of attention in one direction at a time. For a lot of us, that means we are focused on getting kids ready for school, cooking dinner, or trying to keep the house clean. Trying to fully understand the benefits and drawbacks of a social media platform, a new traffic pattern, or how to invest in retirement may seem important, but it can be hard to find the time and mental energy to focus on a complex topic and organize our thoughts in a logical and coherent manner. Nevertheless, we are likely to be presented with situations where we have to make decisions about what level of social media is appropriate for our children, offer comments on new traffic patterns around the water cooler, or finally get around to setting up our retirement plan and deciding what to do with that old 401K from that job we left.

 

Without having adequate time, energy, and attention to think through these difficult decisions, we have to make choices and are asked to have an opinion on topics we are not very informed about. “The affect heuristic”, Kahneman writes, “simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy.” We substitute the hard question that requires detailed thought for a simple question: do I like social media, did I feel that the new traffic pattern made my commute slower, do I like the way my retirement savings advisor presented a new investment strategy. In each case, we rely on affect, our emotional reaction to something, and make decisions in line with our gut feelings. Of course my kid can use social media, I’m on it, I like it, and I want to see what they are posting. Ugh, that new traffic pattern is awful, what were they thinking putting that utility box where it blocks the view of the intersection. Obviously this is the best investment strategy for me, my advisor was able to explain it well and I liked it when they told me I was making a smart decision.

 

We don’t notice when we default to the affect heuristic. It is hard to recognize that we have shifted away from making detailed calculations to rely solely on intuitions about how something makes us feel. Rather than admitting that we buy Nike shoes because our favorite basketball player wears them, and we want to be like LeBron, we create a story in our head about the quality of the shoes, the innovative design, and the complementary colors. We fall back on a quick set of factors that gives the impression of a thoughtful decision. In a lot of situations, we probably can’t do much better than the affect heuristic, but it is worth considering if our decisions are really being driven by affect. We might be able to avoid buying things just out of brand loyalty, and we might be a little calmer and reasonable in debates and arguments with friends and family when we realize we are acting on affect and not on reason.
Fluency of Ideas

Fluency of Ideas

Posted on by jabittan
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, and how this influences our entire outlook on life. Instead, we rely on the fluency of ideas to judge our thoughts and opinions as accurate.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman writes about ideas from Cass Sunstein and jurist Timur Kuran explaining their views on fluency, “the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (and emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind.” It is easy to characterize an entire group of people as hardworking, or lazy, or greedy, or funny based entirely on a single interaction with a single person from that group. We don’t pause to ask if our interaction with one person is really a good reflection of all people who fit the same group as that person, we instead allow the fluency of our past experiences to shape our opinions of all people in that group.

 

And our ideas and the fluency with which those ideas come to mind don’t have to come from our own personal experience. If a claim is repeated often enough, we will have trouble distinguishing it from truth, even if it is absurd and doesn’t have any connection to reality. The idea will come to mind more fluently, and consequently the idea will start to feel true. We don’t have to have direct experience with something if a great marketing campaign has lodge an opinion or slogan in mind that we can quickly recall.

 

If we are in an important decision-making role, it is important that we recognize this fluency bias. The fluency of ideas will drive us toward a set of conclusions that might not be in our best interests. A clever marketing campaign, a trite saying repeated by salient public leaders, or a few extreme yet random personal experiences can bias our judgment. We have to find a way to step back, recognize the narrative at hand, and find reliable data to help us make better decisions, otherwise we might end up judging ideas and making decisions based on faulty reasoning.
—
As an addendum to this post (originally written on 10/04/2020), this morning I began The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker. Early in the introduction, Pinker states that violence in almost all forms is decreasing, despite the fact that for many of us, it feels as though violence is as front and center in our world as ever before. Pinker argues that our subjective experience of out of control violence is in some ways due to the fluency bias that Kahneman describes from Sunstein and Kuran. Pinker writes,

 

“No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.” 

 

The fluency effect causes an observation to feel correct, even if it is not reflective of actual trends or rates in reality.