Robyn Dawes Quotes

Of course, our experience concerning such people also involves exposure to media. The selective-availability problems that arise because the media select interesting (if not sensational) news are well known. Consider the overestimation of murder as a cause of death relative to suicide.

Again, what cannot be is not, and what is can be regarded as an instance of what can be. Individuals who make pseudodiagnoses on the basis of “typical” characteristics—by attending only to the numerator of the likelihood ratio rather than to both numerator and denominator—will similarly be doomed to failure by making diagnoses that are not empirically supported. Because such a diagnostic procedure is based on irrationality, it cannot in general succeed. And similarly, people who argue that both the evidence and its negation support the same conclusion are arguing irrationally, and hence the conclusions will be empirically flawed. The principle is the same.

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.

Prediction is not the same thing as understanding, but in the absence of prediction, we can certainly doubt understanding.

I know better than to say “that’s absurd” to someone trained in Freudian analysis, because such a therapist will simply interpret such an assertion as confirmation of whatever is proposed.

A closely allied type of irrationality is termed irrefutability. This name relates to the idea that a good scientific theory should be refutable: At least in theory, there should be some evidence that would lead us to doubt or reject the theory. If all evidence is simply interpreted as supporting it, then it is termed irrefutable, which is a hallmark of pseudoscience, not of science.

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.

What causes the lunatic to demand that ideas not be subject to scrutiny—and in particular that they not be contradicted? No one knows. It may be part of a deliberate campaign to maintain power, an implicit admission of some semiconscious fear that the ideas might not be good, or just a common aspect of types of behavior that we associate with historical monsters. At least, the correlation is there.

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.

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.

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

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.

As discussed in Chapter 7, we often substitute a good (internally generated) narrative or story for a comparative (“outside”) analysis when we attempt to understand something unusual. We also often substitute pure association for comparison. This reliance on coherent “explanations” provides what is really an illusion of understanding, rather than understanding.
In this chapter, I present the other side of the coin. That is, even when we have a perfectly valid statistical explanation for a phenomenon, we may ignore it because no “good story” accompanies it to persuade us that we should believe it.

At the very least, irrationality per se can be challenged. In contrast, acting irrational because we believe that other people are so irrational that their irrationality cannot be challenged leads to no challenge at all.

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.