Quotes About Bias

The endowment and sunk cost effects live together in a way that amplifies escalation of commitment. Status quo bias adds to the mix of cognitive forces gaffing the scale.

Memory creep is the reconstruction of your memory of what you knew that hindsight bias creates. MEMORY CREEP When what you know after the fact creeps into your memory of what you knew before the fact.

This phenomenon is known as omission-commission bias.

What is hopefully (crystal ball) clear by now is that your beliefs create a bottleneck to good decision-making. It doesn't matter how good the quality of your decision process is if the input into that process is junk. That input is your beliefs, and there is a lot of junk in there.

This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.

Now for the bad news: Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to the inside view. If anything, it makes it worse. It straps your beliefs into the driver's seat more firmly. Research across a variety of settings has shown that being smart makes you better at motivated reasoning, the tendency to reason about information to confirm your prior beliefs and arrive at the conclusion you desire.

Hindsight bias, like resulting, makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe that an outcome, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable.

The verdict appears to be a consequence of hindsight bias—the human tendency to believe that whatever happened was bound to happen, and that everyone must have known it. If [the foreman] believed that an explosion was imminent, then he is a monster; but of that there is no evidence. Hindsight bias is not enough to support a verdict.

When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message, we close our minds to what they are saying and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it. Likewise, when we have a positive opinion of the messenger, we tend to accept the message without much vetting. Both are bad.

Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. Let me give you a different intuitive frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

When we're choosing among new options, loss aversion causes us to favor the ones that have the lowest absolute loss associated with them, even if those options come at a lower expected value. In other words, our aversion to taking a loss causes us to make decisions a rational actor would not.

thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won't make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives.

Hindsight bias adds to the ruckus caused by knowing the outcome, distorting your memory of what you knew at the time of the decision in two ways: You did know what was going to happen—swapping out your actual view at the time of the decision with a faulty memory of that view to conform to your postoutcome knowledge. You should (or could) have known what was going to happen—to the point of predictability or inevitability.

But omission-commission bias causes us not to view these decisions as equivalent. That's why we accept that explanation of "I'm not ready to make a decision yet" from others and why we accept it from ourselves. Of course, what that really means is "I'm not ready to veer from the status quo.

Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren't formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.

Dan Kahan's work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible.

What's quote-unquote a 'good' lawyer, doctor, or whatever the profession is. And if you're a male who grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.

If you say to a group of women professors, 'Close your eyes and think of a professor,' what they will see is a guy. I will. And I'll stop myself and think, 'Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?'

Racial profiling has to stop.

And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it.

Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.

Progressives want a different sort of media than what the Right wants.

Anti-Americanism is often the product of limits on free speech, education systems that promote bias and the practice of some leaders of saying one thing abroad and the opposite at home.