Thinking about how we think
Answer this question: How many animals of each type did Moses take along with him on the Ark? Did you say “two”? Or did you notice the flaw in the question - the actual answer being that Moses was nowhere near the Ark? The answer is at the end of this article, if you are in a hurry.
If you are like most of us, you probably intuitively guessed that the number was two and were somewhat mortified that this question took your intuition for a ride. And now you are wondering - how did this happen?
What we assume to be clear and rational thinking is often not - it is the outcome of a process of mental shortcuts that we often end up taking. The answer is that the brain is designed to, by default, take quick decisions - and it, recognizing the Biblical context of the story, automatically took a shortcut to quickly come up with the ‘right’ answer. But the artful replacement of Noah with Moses was skimmed over by the brain...
The brain uses many such shortcuts and in scientific literature, these are called heuristics.
The specific heuristic used by your brain in trying to get the answer for the above-mentioned Biblical story, relying on ease of memory search, is called the availability heuristic.
And where your brain relies on heuristics, it can be regularly, predictably, systematically led to make errors in judgment and choice. These errors are called biases.
The subject of these meanderings, dear reader, is to explore the world of behavior - specifically, how heuristics and bias tend to overtake rational man. Maybe, somewhere here, we will discover tricks to avoid bias, but that is not the purpose.
I shall keep posting over the next few weeks.
If you haven't figured out already - It was Noah's ark.
So it's a virtuous cycle then? So nurture plays a much bigger role than earlier estimated, eh?
In the field of education teachers tend to view the smartly turned out & polite kids to be smart generally... A good answer by them is seen to reflect their stable personality trait. A missed answer or dumb one is ignored as exception. This greatly affects the child's academic performance. Expectation of smarts creates a series of supportive behaviors in teacher, making these kids perform near the top of class academically
For example, Steve Jobs was the perfect human being ;-)
As a student of psychology I studied a few biases. One I have encountered often is the 'halo effect'.. If someone we know is obviously excellent in or two things (traits) we view all their other qualities as excellent too.