Kahnemann had a great article about cognitive heuristics and cognitive illusions in the NY Times Magazine this past Sunday.
He makes an interesting observation in this article: Like perceptual illusions, cognitive illusions are absolutely compelling to experience. He describes an illusion of confidence in decisions about leadership potential he and his colleagues experienced while observing officer candidates in a team leadership exercise. Week after week he observed candidates perform in this task and made judgments about leadership potential for individual candidates. He had plenty of data based on how these individuals performed in leadership tasks in various real-world challenges later in their careers. The judgments he and his colleagues made for selection were poor predictors of later leadership performance. In fact, the judgments based on the testing task were little more than random guesses. Kahnemann recalls that even though he knew how badly these judgments performed as predictors, when the decisions were made following an observation in this "leadership test," he still had a great sense of confidence that his judgments were solid and accurate. He makes the analogy to perceptual illusions. We know the area in the intersection of a Hering grid is the same brightness as the spaces between tiles in the grid. We can describe the neural interactions that produce the illusion. But all of this knowledge and understanding does not prevent us from seeing little dark spots in the intersection that we focus on with central vision. Claudia Stanny --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=13669 or send a blank email to leave-13669-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
