In terms of the first example in the article, maybe "smarter" people
(or at least people who seem themselves in this way) are more
overconfident, i.e., more willing to accept their intuitive first
guess (the bat costs a dollar, the ball 10 cents) rather than to do
the hard work, i.e. the arithmetic (price of a bat = $1 + price of the
ball, where the two prices add to $1.10).
>>A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by
>>Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the
>>University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are
>>more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that
>>intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T.
>>scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can
>>actually be a subtle curse.
West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and eighty-two
undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias
problems. Here’s a example:
>>> In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch
doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire
lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
<<<
Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the
final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But that’s
wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
West also gave a puzzle that measured subjects’ vulnerability to
something called “anchoring bias,” which Kahneman and Tversky had
demonstrated in the nineteen-seventies. Subjects were first asked if
the tallest redwood tree in the world was more than X feet, with X
ranging from eighty-five to a thousand feet. Then the students were
asked to estimate the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world.
Students exposed to a small “anchor”—like eighty-five feet—guessed, on
average, that the tallest tree in the world was only a hundred and
eighteen feet. Given an anchor of a thousand feet, their estimates
increased seven-fold.
But West and colleagues weren’t simply interested in reconfirming the
known biases of the human mind. Rather, they wanted to understand how
these biases correlated with human intelligence. As a result, they
interspersed their tests of bias with various cognitive measurements,
including the S.A.T. and the Need for Cognition Scale, which measures
“the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking.”
The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was
not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were
aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This
finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and
Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to
significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive
thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and
the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will
take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these
issues,” he writes.
Read more
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz1xgG4FQnk
<<
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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