Quotes About Bias

On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.

The remembering self's neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.

La probabilidad de un evento raro será sobrestimada (a menudo, no siempre) debido al sesgo confirmatorio de la memoria. Si pensamos en ese evento, intentaremos hacerlo verdadero en nuestra mente.

Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold. The confirmatory bias of System 1 favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events. If

people who make judgments behave as if a true value exists, regardless of whether it does.

System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.

From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.

it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.

The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true.

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk.

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.

They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

Highly skilled people are less noisy, and they also show less bias.

The lesson of figure 5 is that predictable illusions inevitably occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or strain. Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsigh

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it

social influences create significant noise across groups.

Because of the coincidence of two planes crashing last month, she now prefers to take the train. That's silly. The risk hasn't really changed; it is an availability bias.

Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the "all natural" one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting "All Natural" or "No Preservatives" on the label.

Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.

When you say 'quite clever,' which reference group do you have in mind?