Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
On the heels of the 2020 election, I cannot decide if this post is timely, or untimely. On the one hand, this post is about how we should think about unlikely events, and I will argue, based on a quote from Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow, that we overweight unlikely outcomes and should … Continue reading Decision Weights
Society is held together by many unspoken rules of fairness, and maintaining rules of fairness is messy but rewarding work. We don't just advocate for fairness in our own lives, but will go out of our way to call out unfairness when we see it hampering the lives of others. We will protest, march in … Continue reading Maintaining the Rules of Fairness with Signaling and Altruistic Punishment
Research from Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow may help explain some of the anger and anti-capitalism sentiment that has cropped up in the United States in the last several years. Senator Bernie Sanders is incredibly popular among a segment of the population and he is not afraid to categorize himself as anti-capitalist and … Continue reading Markets and Fairness
Loss aversion is a dominant force in many of our individual lives and in many of our societies. At this moment, I think it is one of the greatest barriers to change and growth that our entire world needs to overcome in order to move forward to address climate change, to create more equitable and … Continue reading The Dominance of Loss Aversion
Daniel Kahneman presents research from University of Pennsylvania economists Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer to demonstrate the power of loss aversion in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Pope and Schweitzer specifically look at golf, and how professional golfers perform when putting to demonstrate that loss aversion factors into the golfers' performance, a conclusion that … Continue reading Loss Aversion & Golf
"We all know that a friendship that may take years to develop can be ruined by a single action," writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow. I quit Facebook for 2020 to get away from political ads and posts, but I imagine that this year many friendships and relationships have been ended with just … Continue reading Stable Relationships
I hear a lot of criticism of news and the tendency of news organizations to operate under a model of "if it bleeds, it leads." The idea is that news is too negative, that it focuses too much on violent crime, corruption, and scandal rather than important but often somewhat boring news and developments. The … Continue reading Prioritizing Bad News
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses an experiment he helped run to explore the endowment effect. The endowment effect is a cognitive fallacy that helps explain our attachment to things and our unwillingness to part with objects, even when we are offered something greater than the objective value of the the … Continue reading Endowment Effects
"Outcomes that are better than the reference points are gains. Below the reference point they are losses." Daniel Kahneman writes extensively about our subjective experiences of the world in his book Thinking Fast and Slow and about how those subjective experiences can have very serious consequences in our decisions, political stances, and beliefs about … Continue reading Subjective Gains and Losses
My last post was about reference points and how they can create subjective experiences that differ from person to person. If my refence point is dramatically different than another person's, then our experience of the same objective fact or reality can be quite different. If I suddenly won $1 million dollars my life might change … Continue reading Imaginary Reference Points