Quotes About Research

Researchers have applied diverse methods to examine the connection between thinking and self-control. Some have addressed it by asking the correlation question: If people were ranked by their self-control and by their cognitive aptitude, would individuals have similar positions in the two rankings?

Amos and I called our first joint article "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers." We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that "intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well." We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their "statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible.

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.

Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.

extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples. This explanation is not causal.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

Prospect theory turned out to be the most significant work we ever did, and our article is among the most often cited in the social sciences.

The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment.

A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as "I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.

While writing the article that reported these findings, Amos and I discovered that we enjoyed working together.

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair—unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!

demonstrated experimentally, but few can actually be measured.

Amos and I stumbled on the central flaw in Bernoulli's theory by a lucky combination of skill and ignorance.

The same is true when multiple teams of researchers attack a scientific problem, such as the development of a vaccine: we very much want them to look at it from different angles.

Recently, the scientific gods have grown kinder to psychologists.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.40 And occasionally dead.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.

A good way to do econometrics is to look for good natural experiments and use statistical methods that can tidy up the confounding factors that Nature has not controlled for us.

And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.

In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.

patriotism. During his lifetime of study he had concluded it was the most destructive force on the planet.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

Universitair docent is een behoorlijk raar beroep. Om te beginnen staat college geven laag op het lijstje van kwaliteiten waar sollicitatiecommissies van universiteiten naar op zoek zijn. Het belangrijkste criterium is de staat van dienst op onderzoeksgebied die de kandidaat met zich meebrengt. Dat verklaart waarom het sommige docenten ontbreekt aan zelfs de meest basale communicatieve vaardigheden of aan wat voor sociale vaardigheden ook.