The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
1–6 of 6 posts
Re: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
#2I believe this illustrates the point:
Re: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
#3Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a real eye opener to me. The most amazing aspect of some of what he discussed was that human psychology is so persistent, so intrinsic, that even experts that well know our deficiencies still make mistakes in decisions on psychological tests.
Re: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
#4Animals have to act in order to find food, water, mates, escape predators, etc. Therefore, they need a nervous system that includes a fantasy machine that can imagine alternative futures and that includes a choice machine which can initiate actions to realize the chosen future.
Much of human existence consists of poor choices among improbable fantasies.
Re: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
#5Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a real eye opener to me. The most amazing aspect of some of what he discussed was that human psychology is so persistent, so intrinsic, that even experts that well know our deficiencies still make mistakes in decisions on psychological tests.
If you want to have your eyes opened even more, you should also check out Kahneman's debate with Gerd Gigerenzer spanning decades of scientific work.
Gigerenzer challenged Kahneman on the grounds that he has a very specific definition of rationality, probability (single-case vs. relative frequency), etc. and that many of the biases he claimed to have found can be made to "disappear" once you apply a different concept of probability.
To give one example (I'm not 100% sure if I remember everything correctly): In one of Kahneman's studies, he asked participants questions such as "Is Detroit bigger than Anchorage?" and then asked them how sure they were of their answer (e.g. 70% sure). In this case, people would systematically overestimate how correct they were, and Kahneman concluded that there is an "overconfidence bias". Gigerenzer repeated the study, but instead of asking the participants for a confidence estimate at every question, he only asked them at the end how many of questions they got right overall - and in this case, people's estimate was actually very accurate.
Re: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making
#6Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a real eye opener to me. The most amazing aspect of some of what he discussed was that human psychology is so persistent, so intrinsic, that even experts that well know our deficiencies still make mistakes in decisions on psychological tests.
If you want to have your eyes opened even more, you should also check out Kahneman's debate with Gerd Gigerenzer spanning decades of scientific work. Gigerenzer challenged Kahneman on the grounds that he has a very specific definition of rationality, probability (single-case vs. relative frequency), etc. and that many of the biases he claimed to have found can be made to "disappear" once you apply a different concept…
Ditto.