Quotes About Bias

Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others—physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias. When

the brain is a machine for jumping to conclusions

Judgments are both less noisy and less biased when those who make them are well trained, are more intelligent, and have the right cognitive style.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.

System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.

The Affect Heuristic The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

Although hindsight and the outcome bias generally foster risk aversion, they also bring undeserved rewards to irresponsible risk seekers, such as a general or an entrepreneur who took a crazy gamble and won.

We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.

judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times.

The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.

shed new light on the planning fallacy

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.

This example highlights two aspects of choice that the standard model of indifference curves does not predict. First, tastes are not fixed; they vary with the reference point. Second, the disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages, inducing a bias that favors the status quo.

The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions.

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 bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The

Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.

bias is a compelling figure, while noise is the background to which we pay no attention. That is how we remain largely unaware of a large flaw in our judgment.

His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

For example, people: believe that they use their bicycles less often after recalling many rather than few instances are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it

The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.