Quotes About Bias

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing the assessment than on the performance being assessed.

Let's not fall for the outcome bias. This was a stupid decision even though it worked out well.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They

The essence of the focusing illusion is WYSIATI, giving too much weight to the climate, too little to all the other determinants of well-being.

WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

If an event had actually occurred, people exaggerated the probability that they had assigned to it earlier.

The observation that "90% of drivers believe they are better than average" is a well-established psychological finding that has become part of the culture, and it often comes up as a prime example of a more general above-average effect.

Further experiments showed that people were driven to overstate the accuracy not only of their original predictions but also of those made by others.

Moses illusion.

Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad.

The invisibility of noise is a direct consequence of causal thinking.

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

The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

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

She has no evidence for saying that the firm is badly managed. All she knows is that its stock has gone down. This is an outcome bias, part hindsight and part halo effect." "Let's not fall for the outcome bias. This was a stupid decision even though it worked out well.

WYSIATI—what you see is all there is.

anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity

The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The

The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy. The media do not just shape what the public is interested

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects.

The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. 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. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f.

Suggestion and anchoring are both explained by the same automatic operation of System 1.

group polarization. The basic idea is that when people speak with one another, they often end up at a more extreme point in line with their original inclinations. If, for example, most people in a seven-person group tend to think that opening a new office in Paris would be a pretty good idea, the group is likely to conclude, after discussion, that opening that office would be a terrific idea.