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
- Leslie Chapman's book Your Disobedient Servant on inefficiency in the British Civil Service
- Examples of bias towards inefficiency in large organisations
- The "fat cat" phenomenon when directors decide their own salaries
- Contrarian investment strategy: advisers on equities routinely underperform the market
7. Misplaced Consistency
- self-justificatory bias/"bolstering a decision": chosen item (e.g. bought house) seems much more desirable once it is chosen
- Distortions of attitude in relationships
- Escalation of commitment ("foot in the door")
- justification of effort
- Sunk Cost fallacy
- Cognitive dissonance: Festinger and Carlsmith
8. Misuse of Rewards and Punishments
- Intrinsic motivation decreased by excessive extrinsic motivation: "people who are trying to gain a prize will do less imaginative and less flexible work than those of equal talent who are not. In addition they may come to work less hard after winning the prize."
- Punishment of children making them less obedient
- Langer experiment on choice: a chosen lottery ticket is much more valuable to subjects than a randomly allocated lottery ticket. Related experiments with children, students, medical patients
- "If you are a manager, adopt as participatory and egalitarian a style as possible."
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
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