Subjective Validation Cult Indoctrination Groupthink Supernormal Releasers The Affect Heuristic Selling Out Self-Serving Bias The Spotlight Effect The Third Person Effect Catharsis The Misinformation Effect Conformity Extinction Burst Social Loafing The Illusion of Transparency Learned Helplessness Embodied Cognition The Anchoring Effect Attention Self-Handicapping Self-Fulfilling Prophecies The Moment Consistency Bias The Representativeness Heuristic Expectation The Illusion of Control The Fundamental Attribution Error.
Hindsight bias is a close relative of the availability heuristic. You tend to believe anecdotes and individual sensational news stories are more representative of the big picture than they are. You do the same thing with Hindsight Bias, by thinking thoughts and making decisions based on what you know now, not what you used to know.
Knowing hindsight bias exists should arm you with healthy skepticism when politicians and businessmen talk about their past decisions. Also, keep it in mind the next time you get into a debate online or an argument with a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife—the other person really does think he or she was never wrong, and so do you.
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both presidents of the United States, elected one hundred years apart. Both were shot and killed by assassins who were known by three names with fifteen letters, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, and neither killer would make it to trial.
Spooky, huh? It gets better. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. Andrew was born in , Lyndon in What are the odds? In , Morgan Robertson wrote a novel titled Futility. Given that it was written fourteen years before the Titanic sank, eleven years before construction on the vessel even began, the similarities between the book and the real event are eerie. The novel describes a giant boat called the Titan which everyone considers unsinkable.
It is the largest ever created, and inside, it seems like a luxury hotel—just like the as yet unbuilt Titanic. Titan had only twenty lifeboats, half of what it would need should the great ship sink. The Titanic had twenty-four, also half what it needed. In the book, the Titan hits an iceberg in April four hundred miles from Newfoundland.
The Titanic, years later, would do the same in the same month in the same place. The Titan sinks, and more than half of the passengers die, just as with the Titanic.
The number of people on board who die in the book and the number in the future accident are nearly identical. The fictional Titan and the real Titanic both had three propellers and two masts. Both had a capacity of three thousand people. Both hit the iceberg close to midnight. Did Robertson have a premonition? I mean, what are the odds? This is often translated to: Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, The greater part of the battle will be against Hister.
He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron, When the son of Germany obeys no law. Here is another prophecy: Out of the deepest part of the west of Europe, From poor people a young child shall be born, Who with his tongue shall seduce many people, His fame shall increase in the Eastern Kingdom. Hister certainly sounds like Hitler, and that second quatrain seems to drive it home.
If any of this seems too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, you are not so smart. Allow me to explain. Say you go on a date, and the other person reveals he or she drives the same kind of car you do. Hold on a second. Maybe the hand of fate is pushing you toward the other person. You both love pizza, but hate rutabagas.
This is meant to be, you think. You are made for each other. But, take a step back. Now take another. How many people in the world own that model of car? Since you and your date have similar backgrounds and grew up in the same decade, you probably share the same childhood TV shows.
Everyone loves Monty Python. Everyone loves pizza. Many people hate rutabagas. Looking at the factors from a distance, you can accept the reality of random chance. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction.
You have just committed the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes.
In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic. When you are dazzled by the idea of Nostradamus predicting Hitler, you ignore how he wrote almost one thousand ambiguous predictions, and most of them make no sense at all. He seems even less interesting when you find out Hister is the Latin name for the Danube River.
When you marvel at the similarities between the Titan and the Titanic, you disregard that in the novel only thirteen people survived, and the ship sank right away, and the Titan had made many voyages, and it had sails. In the novel, one of the survivors fought a polar bear before being rescued. When you are befuddled by the Lincoln and Kennedy connections, you neglect to notice Kennedy was Catholic and Lincoln was born Baptist. Kennedy was killed with a rifle, Lincoln with a pistol.
Kennedy was shot in Texas, Lincoln in Washington, D. If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos.
Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the gelled hair and fake tan really that dumb? The reach of the fallacy is far greater than reality shows, presidential trivia, and spooky coincidences.
When you use the sharpshooter fallacy to determine cause from effect, it can harm people. One of the reasons scientists form a hypothesis and then try to disprove it with new research is to avoid the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
Epidemiologists are especially wary of it as they study the factors that lead to the spread of disease. If you look at a map of the United States with dots assigned to where cancer rates are highest, you will notice areas of clumping. More often than not, cancer clusters have no scary environmental cause. There are many agents at work.
People who are related tend to live near one another. Old people tend to retire in the same areas. Eating, smoking, and exercise habits tend to be similar region to region. And, after all, one in three people will develop cancer in his or her lifetime. To accept that things like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying.
The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is one way you can create one. According to the Centers for Disease Control the number of autism cases among eight-year-olds increased 57 percent from to the Looking back over the last twenty years, the rate of autism has gone up percent. Today, one in seventy male children has some form of autism spectrum disorder.
It seemed absolutely nuts when those numbers were first released. Parents around the world panicked. Something must be causing autism numbers to rise, right? Once they had a target, a cluster, people failed to see all the other correlations. After years of research and millions of dollars, vaccines have been ruled out, but many refuse to accept the findings.
Singling out vaccines while ignoring the millions of other factors is the same as noting the Titan hit an iceberg but omitting it had sails.
Lucky streaks at the casino, hot hands in basketball, a tornado sparing a church—these are all examples of humans finding meaning after the fact, after the odds are tallied and the numbers have moved on. You are ignoring the times you lost, the times the ball missed the basket, and all the homes the tornado blindly devoured. People began to believe German spies lived in the spared buildings.
Analysis afterward by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed the bombing strike patterns were random. Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. If you were to shuffle a deck and draw out ten cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what the cards are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of ten cards.
The meaning is a human construct. Look outside. See that tree? The chances of it growing there on that spot, on this planet, circling this star, in this galaxy, among the billions of galaxies in the known universe, are so incredibly small it seems to have meaning, but that meaning is only a figment of your imagination.
The odds of it being there are no less astronomical than the odds of it being in the patch of dirt beside it. The same is true if you looked out onto a desert and found a lizard, or into the sky and found a cloud, or into space and saw nothing but hydrogen atoms floating alone. There is a percent chance something will be there, be anywhere, when you look; only the need for meaning changes how you feel about what you see.
To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder, and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, is a painful conceit. You commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame. You mow your lawn, arrange your silverware, comb your hair. Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their relentless derangement. Your drive to do this is primal. You need order. Order makes it easier to be a person, to navigate this sloppy world.
For ancient man, pattern recognition led to food and protected people from harm. You are able to read these words because your ancestors recognized patterns and changed their behavior to better acquire food and avoiding becoming it. Evolution has made us into beings looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes. Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife.
You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all.
Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something that keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish. Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there?
By now you could draw the cover art to Dead Man Walking from memory. Why do you keep passing over it? A study conducted in by Read, Loewenstein, and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of twenty-four. Some were lowbrow, like Sleepless in Seattle or Mrs. In other words, it was a choice between movies that promised to be fun and forgettable and those that would be memorable but required more effort to absorb. After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away.
They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. They knew it was a great movie because all of their friends said it was, and it had earned dozens of the highest awards.
Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies, like The Mask, or action flicks, like Speed, when they knew they had to watch their choice forthwith. Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third. The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.
Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit.
A week later, when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake. This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for Family Guy. With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.
Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you can deflect arrows. You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights. One day you have the choice between going for a run or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad.
You choose the cheeseburger. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes, it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year. Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life. You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents.
You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote.
You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Perhaps the stakes are higher than choosing to play Angry Birds instead of doing sit-ups.
You might have a deadline for a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or a book. Before you do though, maybe you should check your e-mail.
You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.
You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are more than books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone new books on the topic were published.
Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat? To explain, consider the power of marshmallows. Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late s and early s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children. The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie, or a giant marshmallow.
They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away.
Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises. What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition—thinking about thinking. Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high school, college, and into adulthood, where they accumulated children, mortgages, and jobs.
They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them. They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in. The ones who were better at holding off their desire to snatch the marshmallow used that same power to squeeze more out of life.
The ones who rang the bell quickly showed a higher incidence of behavioral problems. The ones who could hold out ended up with SAT scores that were on average more than two hundred points higher than scores for the ones who ate the marshmallow. Thinking about thinking—this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states.
In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now and later. Later is a murky place where anything could go wrong. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right? After all, you already have to wait a long time. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater.
In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before. If you considered which would be more valuable in a month—continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop—you would pick the greater reward.
The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting, because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt.
One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines. You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two in the first week and one in the second.
You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. How would you pick? The most rational choice would be the last day for every paper. It gives you plenty of time to work hard on all three and turn in the best possible work. This seems like a wise choice, but you are not so smart. The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Ariely.
They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.
Which class had the better grades? Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst. Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own.
They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade. Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers. The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated.
If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect someday far away.
You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is the you some time in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires; a you for whom an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality. The now-you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.
Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties. This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food that future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.
Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.
If you knew a horrific mile-wide force of nature was headed toward your home, what would you do? Would you call your loved ones? Would you head outside and look for the oncoming storm? Would you leap into a bathtub and cover yourself with a mattress? No matter what you encounter in life, your first analysis of any situation is to see it in the context of what is normal for you and then compare and contrast the new information against what you know usually happens.
Because of this, you have a tendency to interpret strange and alarming situations as if they were just part of business as usual. For three days in , a series of horrific tornadoes scrubbed clean the Oklahoma countryside.
Among them was a monster force of nature later called the Bridge Creek—Moore F5. The F5 part of the name comes from the Enhanced Fujita Scale. It goes from EF1 to EF5 and measures the intensity of a twister. Less than 1 percent of tornadoes ever reach the top level. At 4, cars go airborne and whole houses are leveled. The winds in Bridge Creek—Moore reached Warnings were issued thirteen minutes in advance, yet many people did nothing as the monster approached.
They milled around and hoped the killer would spare them. In the end, the beast destroyed 8, homes and killed 36 people. Many more would surely have perished if there had been no warning at all. For instance, a similar twister in killed So, given there was a warning, why did some people not heed the call to action and seek shelter from the colossus?
The tendency to flounder in the face of danger is well understood and expected among tornado chasers and meteorologists. Tales of those who choose to ride out hurricanes and tornado-spewing storm clouds are common.
Weather experts and emergency management workers know you can become enveloped in a blanket of calm when terror enters your heart. Psychologists refer to it as normalcy bias. First responders call it negative panic. This strange counterproductive tendency to forget self-preservation in the event of an emergency is often factored into fatality predictions in everything from ship sinkings to stadium evacuations.
Disaster movies get it all wrong. In his book Big Weather, tornado chaser Mark Svenvold wrote about how contagious normalcy bias can be. He recalled how people often tried to convince him to chill out while fleeing from impending doom.
Stake- holding peers, he said, would try to shame him into denial so they could remain calm. Normalcy bias flows into the brain no matter the scale of the problem. It will appear whether you have days and plenty of warning or are blindsided with only seconds between life and death.
Imagine you are in a Boeing airplane as it touches down after a long flight. You hide a sigh of relief once the ground ceases to rush closer and you hear the landing gear chirp against the runway. You release the hand rests as the engines power down. You sense the bustle of four hundred people preparing to leave. The tedious process of taxiing to the terminal begins.
You play back some of the moments on the giant plane, thinking how it was a pleasant flight with few bumps and nice people all around. You are already collecting your things and getting ready to remove your seat belt.
You look out the window and try to make out something familiar in the fog. Without warning, shock waves of heat and pressure tear into your flesh. A terrible blast rattles your organs and tears at all corners of the plane. A noise like two trains colliding under your chin bursts eardrums up and down the aisles. An explosion tunnels through the spaces around you, filling every gap and crevice with streamers of flame surging down the aisles and over your head, under your feet.
They recede just as quickly, leaving unbearable heat. Clumps of your hair crumple into ashes. Now all you hear is the crackle of fire. Imagine you are sitting on this plane now. The top of the craft is gone and you can see the sky above you. Columns of flame are growing. Holes in the sides of the airliner lead to freedom. How would you react? Statistically, neither of these is likely.
What you would probably do is far weirder. A Pan Am aircraft with people on board was taxiing along the runway in dense fog when a Dutch KLM flight with inside asked to be cleared for takeoff on the same airstrip.
The crew misheard their instructions. Thinking they had just been given permission, they began to speed toward the other plane. Air traffic controllers tried to warn them, but radio interference garbled the messages. Too late, the captain of the KLM flight saw the other craft ahead of him. The KLM airplane bounced off the Pan Am jet, soared for five hundred feet, and then tumbled in a terrible jet fuel explosion.
Everyone on board disintegrated. The fire was so intense it would burn until the next day. Instead, they rushed to the flaming wreckage of the KLM plane. For twenty minutes, in the chaos, firefighters and emergency personnel thought they were dealing with only one problem and believed the flames peeking out from the fog in the distance were just more wreckage.
The survivors on board the Pan Am flight would not be rescued. The crash sheared away most of the top half of the People lay in pieces from the impact. Flames spread through the carnage. A massive fire began to take over the plane. Smoke filled the fuselage. To live, people had to act quickly. They had to unbuckle, move through the chaos onto the intact wing, and then jump twenty feet onto wreckage. Escape was possible, but not all of the survivors would attempt it.
Some bolted into action, unbuckled loved ones and strangers and pushed them out to safety. Others stayed put and were consumed. Soon after, the center fuel tank exploded, killing all but the seventy people who had made their way outside. In that one minute, several dozen people who could have escaped failed to take action, failed to break free of paralysis. Why did so many people flounder when seconds mattered? Psychologist Daniel Johnson has rigorously studied this strange behavior.
In his research he interviewed survivors of the Tenerife crash among many other disasters, including skyscraper fires and sinking ships, to better understand why some people flee when others do not. In the first moments of the incident, right after the top of the plane was sliced open, Paul Heck looked over to his wife, Floy.
She was motionless, frozen in place and unable to process what was happening. He screamed for her to follow him. They unbuckled, clasped hands, and he led her out of the plane as the smoke began to billow. Floy later realized she possibly could have saved those sitting in a stupor just by yelling for them to join her, but she too was in a daze, with no thoughts of escape as she blindly followed her husband.
She told the reporter she remembered looking back just before leaping out of a gash in the wall. She saw her friend still in the seat next to where they had been sitting with her hands folded in her lap, her eyes glassed over. Her friend did not survive the fire. In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or a towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all.
You will float away and leave a senseless statue in your place. You may even lie down. If no one comes to your aid, you will die. John Leach, a psychologist at the University of Lancaster, also studies freezing under stress.
He says about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom. On the edges, the 15 or so percent on either side of the bell curve react either with unimpaired, heightened awareness or blubbering, confused panic. According to Johnson and Leach, the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do. They were in a fire as a child or survived a typhoon.
Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before. They move when others are considering whether or not they should. As Johnson points out, the brain must go through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and then movement.
Johnson likens it to playing an instrument. With a few minutes of practice, you can strum without as much deliberation and create a more pleasant sound. To suddenly stop moving and hope for the best is called fear bradycardia, and it is an automatic and involuntarily instinct. This is sometimes referred to as tonic immobility.
I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, psychology lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Coe by David B.
0コメント