Notes on Stuart Sutherland (1994) Irrationality: the Enemy Within. Penguin paperback

Up: Key References

In terms of making a great breadth of research easy to understand with a variety of examples and applications, this is still the best non-technical introduction to the topic of cognitive biases. It looks at judgement and decision-making in many contexts, from military tactics to medicine and from job interviews to the paranormal. It relies heavily on scientific research -  there are many elegant descriptions of psychological experiments - yet the technical details are kept out of the main text to make it easy for a non-specialist reader, and much of the text deals with real-life instances of bias. 324 footnotes point to the book's scientific basis.

The version I have is the first edition. A second, revised edition has been released in 2007. Cordelia Fine's A Mind of Its Own covers newer research than the first edition but it's not nearly as ambitious a book.

If it has a flaw, it's on the philosophical side rather than the psychological side. In order to judge that some behaviour is irrational, you need a clear standard of rationality and an understanding of why that is the best choice. Sutherland is good at succinctly explaining the normative standards, but some of his examples are not as clear-cut as he makes them out, and there is a legitimate scientific question about whether some of the decisions he talks about are irrational (see for example my Are People Bayesian?).

Outline

1. Introduction

2. The Wrong Impression

• Availability heuristic
• Primacy error: Asch experiment in which rearranging the order of words in a description affects the impression it makes on subjects
• Halo effect/ devil effect
• Halo effect bias in peer review

3. Obedience

•  Milgram obedience experiment

4. Conformity

• Asch conformity experiment 
• Effect of verbal commitment on future action: consistency effect
• Credibility of experts: halo effect
• Crowd behaviours: panic, violence, contagious emotion (including religious conversion)
• Bystander effect (conforming to others' inaction)

5. In-groups and Out-groups

• Drift of attitudes while staying in a group is not towards the centre but towards the extreme of the group's distinctive attitude
• Risky shift: (group judgement is more risky than judgement of individuals)
• Groupthink (Janis): "illusion of invulnerability coupled with extreme optimism"; stereotyped thinking about people outside group; suppression of doubt, dissent and unfavourable facts
• Effect of uniform worn by subject on aggression
• Sherif research on conflict between arbitrarily created groups
• Stereotype bias in memory

6. Organisational Folly

7. Misplaced Consistency

8. Misuse of Rewards and Punishments

• Intrinsic motivation decreased by excessive extrinsic motivation.

9. Drive and Emotion

10. Ignoring the Evidence

11. Distorting the Evidence

12. Making the Wrong Connections

13. Mistaken Connections in Medicine

14. Mistaking the Cause

15. Misinterpreting the Evidence

16. Inconsistent Decisions and Bad Bets

17. Overconfidence

18. Risks

19. False Inferences

20. The Failure of Intuition

21. Utility

22. The Paranormal

23. Causes, Cures and Costs