The Science of Irrational Decisions 244
The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
I'm not one to normally complain about articles... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a quote in the summary from a blog referenced. The blog is not linked to -- instead the only link is to a site (Amazon, I think) selling the book.
Where's the actual discussion of what's in the book? Where's the article (or blog entry)?
If you're going to post a book review... please, include the review. Otherwise it looks like you're just hocking a book.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Still, GIGO (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it any wonder our minds are wired to assume we were right and keep on moving in the same directions? The brain is trying to keep you alive; anything you have done up to this point won't kill you, so why would the brain try to change that? That's why few people really have a life changing moment unless forced upon them by war, death, or other bad things. When the going is good, you will keep going.
Re:The implications (Score:1, Insightful)
As opposed to the liberal belief that killing a violent criminal is bad, but killing an unborn child is good. Or that problems created by government intervention are best solved by additional government intervention.
I'm an Objectivist libertarian, and my beliefs are in fact based on rationality. Both sides of mainstream American politics are equally inconsistent, though the right tends to get things right slightly more often than the left - say, a 60/40 split or so.
Cognitive Dissonance (Score:2, Insightful)
So, it is basically about cognitive dissonance? [wikipedia.org]
Re:The implications (Score:4, Insightful)
As opposed to the liberal belief that...killing an unborn child is good.
I'm an Objectivist libertarian, and my beliefs are in fact based on rationality.
beep...boop...DOES NOT COMPUTE! How'd rationality lead you to think that "liberal belief" includes the idea that killing an unborn child is "good?"
Re:Yeehaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Science basically involved checking whether what "everyone knows" is actually correct, and then trying to find out why.
Re:Yeehaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. I knew the "hurr durr, what good is this study, it's only repeating common sense, what a waste of time/resources" response was coming as soon as I read the summary title, but I didn't expect it would be the first post. Especially since this story is specifically ABOUT the way that people are prone to believe "obvious" things in spite of actual evidence.
Please, get this through your heads: "common sense" (another name for biases gained from anecdotes and cultural groupthink) is often misleading, unreliable, over-broad, or outright wrong. At one time it was "common sense" that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. It was "common sense" that large, heavy objects can't float in water. It was "common sense" that the world is flat and women and blacks are intellectually inferior to white men and that the planets and moons are perfect spheres orbiting in perfect circles.
Science is about testing claims through empirical experiment--sometimes the results match up with "common sense", sometimes they don't. Sure, this story an example of a place where experiment confirmed something that is fairly obvious on its face--but the data goes a long way towards better understanding the WHYS and HOWS of this "obvious" phenomenon. Data is never a bad thing.
Laziness and Pride (Score:5, Insightful)
To me laziness and pride are the two biggest obstacles to rational thinking.
Laziness since, more often than not, simply sitting down and thinking things through you can avoid most irrational decisions. Time constraints can make this difficult. But I'm surprised at how often I see family/friends make poor decisions simply because they don't know how to stop and think. I like this quote from Samuel Johnson since it articulates the fact that easy access to information does not mean people will spend the energy to even look at it (let alone use it wisely):
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Next to laziness, is pride. This boils down to the fact that culturally we're often taught to focus on being right rather than focusing on what's right. This comes from the illusion that one can own or control truth. I've seen this affect friendships, marriages, professional atmospheres, politics, etc. Truth is independent. You either align yourself with it or continue to live in ignorance. Of course, objective indisputable truth is rare or even non-existent in humanity, but it's the honest, humble desire to align oneself with truth (not the other way around) that's important here.
Re:Hmmm (Score:1, Insightful)
It's sort of cute how you think that you have any credibility to dismiss sociologists when you've already made it obvious that you don't understand basic statistics. But hey, don't let a little thing like facts intrude on your smug condescension.
Re:So (Score:3, Insightful)
I appreciate the link, but the improper and confusing use of a word throughout history doesn't make it correct. Even the author of the article you linked decries the use of the word in a confusing manner.
I really did like the article, though :)
Re:The implications (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I clarified this point in a response to another reply.
I split from the conservative movement a long time ago due to issues like this. Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
It bothers me that so many people hold positions on issues of great importance based on how they "feel", rather than seeking to find the truth.
Re:So (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that the next time someone calls the big tower next to their monitor their "hard drive", or calls their desktop wallpaper their "screen saver", or talks about the time they "programmed MS Office" when they just installed it from the CD.
Re:The implications (Score:2, Insightful)
Sin (Score:0, Insightful)
The difference between "want" and "need" inspires people to demonstrate behavior of "get" and "take". Those are irrational decisions and, over the course of a lifetime, lead to death through accumulated damage to something we could define as faith.
The way to preserve faith, and avoid death, is by practicing faith. Have the patience to receive and be free of the weaknesses which cause action based upon the desire to get or to take.
Consider that you are a fish living in a stocked pond. 99.99999% of everything is bait.
Re:The implications (Score:3, Insightful)
Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
Well, there's your problem.
The question has a false premise. "When does human life begin?" That assumes there's a clear, objective marker that exists before and after life "begins."
Does life begin at conception? No, because the body often gobbles up fertilized eggs, or the body accidentally splits the early zygotes to create identical twins, or a million other wacky things can happen to the embryo. If each time, a human life is destroyed or cleaved asunder with the body's natural processes--well, if you're a sexually active woman, I hope you can hire a good defense attorney for those genocide charges.
Does life begin when the fetus can survive outside of the womb by itself? No, because medical technology is making it possible to survive outside of the womb earlier and earlier, and pretty soon we won't need a woman to carry the child at all.
Does life begin when a child is finally born? Our legal system certainly doesn't think so. Killing a late-term pregnant woman is worth 2 points, after all.
Whatever point someone chooses is arbitrary and probably based on vague notions of "souls" or "consciousness" or whatever. Trying to find the "truth" of when a life begins is like trying to find the precise moment that your milk-drenched Frosted Flakes change from crunchy to soggy.
Re:So (Score:3, Insightful)
For what it's worth - the sentence I abhor is the "Never Assume - it makes an ass of you and me!" bit of obnoxious cleverness, even more annoying than "There is no I in Team!".
It just irritates the hell out of me, since all logical though is in fact based on *some* set of propositions taken for granted. Euclid is based on one set of assumptions, Riemannian geometries an almost identical set of assumptions. Good thing for both Newton and Einstein Euclid never bought into *that* BS.
"Never Assume" only seems 'clever' to Sophist jackasses that don't want to give any ground in which they might lose an argument - as even Socrates observed, that was the entire point of the Sophists, that by not giving *any* starting ground with which to start a debate, they could switch arguments midstream and be seemingly unbeatable, but could not be counted on to achieve any sort of truth in the end.
Know your assumptions by all means. Be prepared to test them, to notice if an assumption leads to a contradiction, to discard it if it proves untrue.
But "Never Assume"? Never trust the worldview of anyone that thinks that's clever commentary on life.
Pug
11% - 27% of the shared variance (Score:3, Insightful)
Just want to point out that even though the correlation coefficients are definitely significant, that isn't effect size. Squaring the coefficients will give you a better idea of the size of the effect we're talking about here. In this case, the effect was found to account for about 11% to 27% of the shared variance. This is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it also doesn't mean that you can really bet on it.
I'm not one of these "social science isn't science" trolltards. I just like to remind people to think in effect sizes to temper their enthusiasm. This is interesting stuff, no matter what, but having a couple quick 'n' dirty formulae for calculating effect size in your mental pocket will keep your reality check intact.