Robyn Dawes Quotes

The realpolitik view of the individual human—that we are slaves to our desires and attitudes and that knowledge and rationality are necessarily secondary to these other factors—is simply wrong. We have the competence to be knowledgeable and rational, especially when we interact freely with each other. We can indeed change our minds. We can “bend over backward to be defense attorneys against our own pet ideas.” We can reconsider. We can be rational.

Unfortunately, good stories are so compelling to us when we take the role of psychologist or social analyst that we do not realize that at best they constitute just a starting point for analysis.

Many people operate as if there are two separate and equal sources of information—the self and others, where the number of others is irrelevant. The result is a “truly” false-consensus effect in the context of knowing one’s own plus a certain number of others’ responses.

Again, irrationality can hurt, and here we have evidence that a particular form of it is widespread. The people accused around hurt, and the clients—be they children or grown adults—are hurt. Irrationality is not simply an amusing diversion provided by tarot cards or Ouija boards.

A particular example (i. e., of irrationality) involves interviews. Despite all the evidence about the uselessness of interviews in predicting future behavior, people remain convinced that some people—especially themselves—are superb at “psyching out” other people during an interview. In contrast, the research indicates that interviews are effective only insofar as they yield information they could more consistently and more validly be incorporated into a statistical model. One problem, of course, that leads to the belief in the superiority of the unstructured interview is that it is, in fact, not studied; there is almost no systematic feedback to most interviewers. Much of the time, the interviewer is in a particular position in an organization and never sees the interviewee again. Second, if the interviewer does see the interviewee later, then that means that the interviewee has been accepted, which often implies fairly reasonable performance. Moreover, it is always possible to rationalize failures.

The world as postulated by the recovered-memory theorists is not an impossible one—just an extraordinarily unlikely one.

Unfortunately, there are many irrational conclusions and beliefs in our culture from which to choose. Those analyzed at some length—and as precisely as possible—are those with which I am most familiar. With public opinion polls indicating that more people in the United States believe in extrasensory perception than in evolution, it is not surprising that examples abound.

If we reject the idea of the “intrinsic rationality of whatever we do” (at least if we are not some sort of superb expert or monstrous political leader), then we must value scrutiny, which brings me to my final point: the necessity and value of a free society. When we scrutinize arguments, we often do so in a collective way….
If disagreement can lead to the presentation of one’s remains in a body bag to one’s spouse, this type of scrutiny is horribly constrained. Such constraint in turn implies that irrational conclusions will go unchallenged, and again because irrationality implies impossibility, that lack of challenge in turn implies belief in false conclusions. Such belief harms both societies and individuals.

The Milgram studies led to a great deal of criticism from other academic and professional psychologists. Ironically, the major focus of this criticism was that the studies would “destroy faith in psychologists as authorities,” to which Milgram’s response was “Fine!”

Two biases of memory, however, tend to enhance the illusory nature of our retrospective “understanding” of our own and others’ lives. The first is that we tend to overestimate specific events relative to general categories of events. The second is that we tend to recall specific events and to interpret them in ways that make sense out of a current situation—“sense” in terms of our cultural and individual beliefs about stability and change in the life course. Thus, memories, which appear to be beyond our control as if we are observing our previous life on a video screen, are like anecdotes in that they are often (inadvertently) “chosen for a purpose.” The result is that they will tend to reinforce whatever prior beliefs we have, just as anecdotes tend to reinforce the points they are meant to illustrate.

The limitation of the story to a single sequence and the essentially ad hoc nature of causal attributions call into question the whole procedure of using stories as evidence, and of thinking that they establish causality or patterns of reasons.

Any of these antecedents could have been connected with different consequences—in particular with many scenarios involving safe landings. What we have done is a creative act, but the problem is that we do not really know what the general relationship is between these antecedents and the important consequence of whether the landing is a crash or a safe one; in fact we cannot do so by observing a single “story” of a crash. At the least, we would have to compare this story to additional stories involving safe landings (again, a nonevent). This comparison is made rather difficult, however, by the decision of the Federal Transportation Department to erase tapes following uneventful landings so that these tapes can be reused. Thus, critical comparisons are lacking in the story model of causality. The story model is compelling, but its compelling nature is essentially illusory.

Thus, even if we accept that the people are deviously neurotic rather than outright irrational, we still must specify exactly how they believe that the rest of us can be fooled by them. Throughout the book, I will assert that they are urging us (and themselves) to “associate, but not compare.” This book is written in partial hope that the readers will end up making appropriate comparisons, rather than simple associations—which generally lead to a deficient specification of the categories necessary to reach a rational conclusion.

Believing you’re good at something just because you do it—without any information that you’re doing it well—is indeed irrational.

These people were saying in effect that “I would be rational except that you are so irrational that I can’t be.” This stance makes the person who adopts it just as culpable as anyone who flat-out endorses irrationality.