Quotes About Bias

How Groups Amplify Noise

once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.

As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television.

Unless you are a professional, however, you may not react very differently to a sample of 150 and to a sample of 3,000. That is the meaning of the statement that "people are not adequately sensitive to sample size.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I

When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favorably than he deserves. The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias—the halo effect—makes it easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand.

whenever accuracy is the goal, bias and noise play the same role in the calculation of overall error.

There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make. Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.... The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias--the halo effect--makes it easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.

He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal.

framing effects: the large changes of preferences that are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem.

The procedure I adopted to tame the halo effect conforms to a general principle: decorrelate error!

We called this reliance on the ease of memory search the availability heuristic.

We proposed that they used resemblance as a simplifying heuristic (roughly, a rule of thumb) to make a difficult judgment. The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions.

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality

Losses are weighted about twice as much as gains in several contexts:

People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.

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.

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

When we substitute an easier question for the one we should be answering, errors are bound to occur.

Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.