The article is long because the content is hardcore
Flying, train, car, which one is more dangerous?
What is the probability of heart disease in middle-aged men?
Can I get a domestic vaccine?
Should I buy a house now?
……
People tend to judge the probability of an event based on the examples they come up with.
Often, ordinary events are easier to remember or imagine than rare ones. For example, politicians are more likely to be thought of as men than women.
However, there are some events that are easier to think about, not because such events occur more often or have a higher probability of occurrence, but simply because such events are easier to extract. It may be because such an event has just happened, or it may be that such an event is mixed with a lot of emotional factors.
Memory will deceive yourself.
1
Accessibility inspires Availability Heuristic
Amos Tversky amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman, 1974
In the first article, "Selective Perception", it is mentioned that human cognition is selective. Your interests and circumstances may affect your cognition.
An elderly friend said: "When my first child was born, I saw babies everywhere; and now that I have arthritis, I see people on crutches everywhere. ”
It's easy for this friend to think of people with children and crutches, and therefore overestimate the probability of these events. Conversely, people who lack these specific interests may not pay attention to people with children and crutches, so they may underestimate the probability of these events.
Similarly, journalists who follow a candidate on the campaign and see that the candidate is warmly welcomed in one township after another often overestimate his popularity. These journalists easily think of scenes of enthusiastic support and rarely of examples of opponents — masses who don't like the candidate stay at home.
If a concert, speech, etc. gets just praise, then the readiness of positive information will make you overestimate your own success rate on these things, because people who don't like you usually stay silent.
People who buy a certain brand of car will find more cars of the same model on the road and will overestimate the popularity of the car. People who buy a stock will find more information about that stock or industry.
2
Media impact
On October 29, 2018, a 189-passenger Boeing 737 MAX8 passenger plane of Indonesia Lion Air crashed into the sea 13 minutes after takeoff, and on March 10, 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft carrying 157 people crashed six minutes after taking off near the capital Addis Ababa.
Two consecutive unsaved air crashes in five months, the cause of which needs to be further ascertained. After such a serious plane accident, which one do you think is more dangerous to take a plane, train, car?
Statistics show that the probability of a fatal accident is 0.18 in 1 million, that is, only 1 in 5 million flights crashes. According to the official data of the China Welfare Lottery, the probability of winning the first prize of the Welfare Lottery is 1 in 17.7 million, which is relatively close.
If you don't want to fly and get into an accident, don't buy lottery tickets.
According to the International Air Transport Association, there were about 36.8 million flights in all of 2017, and the civil aviation accident mortality rate was an average of one passenger death per 7.36 million flights. According to World Health, road traffic injuries killed 1.4 million people in 2016.
Which is more likely to be killed by parts that fall from the sky than to be bitten by a shark?
Most people would think that it is more likely to be killed by a shark, and the movie "Jaws" plays a lot of roles.
The media particularly likes to report violent, dramatic deaths, such as homicides or hurricanes, and less likely to cause a sensation, such as illness. People will use these reports to assess the frequency of events.
In fact, in the United States, 30 times more people have been killed by shark bites than parts that have fallen from the sky by airplanes.
It is believed that more people die in homicides than from stomach cancer, and the truth is that the latter has a 17 times higher fatality rate than the former.
Tornadoes are thought to be more deadly than asthma, and the truth is that the latter has a 20-fold fatality rate.
It is believed that accidental death is equal to the probability of death from illness, and the fact is that the latter is 18 times higher than the former.
People estimate the likelihood of an event occurring based on how easily it evokes in the brain. Because traffic accidents, tornadoes, or murders are almost all media headlines, it's "easier to extract" than those that occur more frequently: stomach cancer, asthma, or diabetes.
The media can also bias people's perceptions of social groups. For example, if the media only reports on blacks who commit crimes, individuals who don't know much about blacks overestimate the probability of black crimes.
Hollywood celebrity divorces and politician sex scandals are particularly striking, and it's not hard to think of them. So it's easy to exaggerate the frequency of divorce events and political sex scandals in Hollywood.
A marketing director at a software company named Mustafa, after Trump's election as president of the United States, reflected on why he was so surprised:
Our social networks have become a giant echo chamber where we basically discuss almost identical views with peers with similar views... completely failing to deeply understand the views of other social circles.
One concept similar to accessibility is vividness.
Vividness usually refers to how specific and easy to imagine an event is. Sometimes, it refers to the emotional excitement of something, or the proximity between events in time or space. The results of many studies suggest that decision makers are more susceptible to vivid information than bland, abstract or statistical data.
The power of vivid information is favored by advertisers, politicians, and many other "professional persuaders." One area where vividness can play a decisive role is in the courtroom, where the vividness of information can influence the jury's final decision.
Although vivid effects can be effective in some contexts, there are limitations to their scope and effectiveness. At the same time, according to the general principle of accessibility inspiration, a vivid description of an event can improve people's judgment of the probability and frequency of its occurrence relative to bland information.
As mentioned in the previous article, vividness makes the case described both "representative" and "readily available". The more details, the more convincing.
3
Significance
Before an event comes to mind, one must pay attention to it.
The significance or prominence of information determines whether people pay attention to it and how much attention is paid to it. If we pay more attention to highly significant information, it will be easier for us to capture, and it will have a greater impact on our judgment.
Shelley Taylor & Susan Fiske, Susan Fiske, 1978
In a study by Taylor and Fiske (1975), six observers looked at two people in conversation from three different angles: two observers sat behind one speaker and the other two sat in opposite positions; the remaining two observers sat in positions capable of viewing two speakers at the same time. All participants observed the same conversation at the same time.
When asked how much each discussant influenced the conversation, their answers were influenced by the speaker's (own) significance. For speakers who saw more clearly, participants rated them as more influential. Obviously, the position where the observer is sitting will feel that someone is more prominent, and thus think that that person is particularly influential.
A particular individual will also attract your attention for other reasons. You may inadvertently notice the only woman or black person in the room and therefore think that she plays a more important role (Taylor & Fiske, 1978).
Accessibility heuristics can explain this saliency effect: focusing our attention on a particular individual leads us to perceive and recall more of that person's contribution. When trying to evaluate the influence of some people in interactive activities, people are more likely to have access to information about individuals who have significant contributions, and therefore think that the person is more influential.
4
Self-centered bias
Ask each couple what percentage of the household chores are undertaken. The answer is interesting, the sum of the percentages given by two people is greater than 100%.
People think they contribute more to the fruits of their joint efforts than they actually do, and Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly define this tendency as the egocentric bias of egocentric bias.
Ross and Sicoly (1979) found that there was a self-centered bias in couples evaluating their contributions to housework, students evaluating their contributions in class discussions, and basketball players evaluating their contributions at key moments of the game.
People overestimate their contributions in collaboration because their contributions are more accessible to them.
Wives will remember every time they take out the garbage and wash the dishes, without noticing their husband's contributions, especially when the wife is not present. People always remember examples of their own contributions more than their peers, and the more examples they remember, the stronger the egocentric bias will be.
In another study, participants were asked to pay attention to their partner's contributions, which allowed them to assign more responsibility to their peers. The end result is that people underestimate the contributions of their peers not entirely because they do not pay attention to them; in fact, we may know the contributions of our peers, but we cannot consciously recall them.
Being aware of one's own prejudices can make couples live in harmony.
5
One-sided problem
Most people will be shy in some occasions and cheerful in others. But as mentioned in the previous article – questions affect the answer, and if only one aspect is asked, the behaviors associated with that aspect become more accessible, which affects self-perception.
When asked if you are shy, you may think of examples of shyness, such as sometimes feeling sick in social situations and remaining silent at a large dinner party; conversely, when asked if you are cheerful, you may also think of some examples of cheerfulness, such as having a lot of friends, and sometimes introducing yourself in front of strangers.
If you focus on shyness, you will think that you are more introverted; if you focus on being cheerful, you will think that you are more extroverted.
Russell Fazio et al. confirmed this effect (Fazio, Effrein, & Falender, 1981).
In the first phase of the experiment, a subset of the participants were asked to answer a series of one-sided questions that focused their attention on the extroverted side of their personalities, for example, what to do if you wanted to make the dance come alive. Ask another segment of participants to focus on the introverted side of their personality, for example, what do you hate most at a noisy party?
As a result, participants whose attention was directed to the extroverted side considered themselves more extroverted and also behaved more extroverted than those whose attention was directed to the introverted side of their personality. Obviously, through one-sided problems, the individual's self-knowledge is biased, and this easily available biased information can affect people's self-concept.
In short, you can make yourself more extroverted.
6
The ease of searching for examples
There is a scene in the TV series Cracker that goes like this:
A woman wants to save her marriage and asks a therapist for help. At first, the doctor told her to come up with all the things about her husband that she liked.
Anyone who knows what one-sided issues play will think it's a good technique: focusing the woman's attention on the positive aspects of her husband will make her see her husband more positively, which is the first crucial first step in bringing them into harmony as a couple.
Unfortunately, this example backfired. When she realized that it was difficult for her to remember her husband's strengths, she immediately rushed out of the doctor's office and immediately filed for divorce from her husband.
Norbert Schwarz et al. devised a very ingenious way to examine these two explanations separately (Schwarz et al., 1991).
Suppose you were asked to come up with 12 examples of your own confident behavior. You'll recall the first seven or eight effortlessly. But if you recall one more thing later, it will become more difficult.
In one experiment, Schwarz et al. asked some participants to come up with 12 scenarios in which they were confident; it was relatively easy to ask another subset of participants to come up with only 6 of these scenarios. Ask the other two groups of participants to come up with 12 or 6 scenarios in which they were not acting confident enough.
Interestingly, while participants who asked to cite 12 examples produced more examples of self-confidence than those who asked to cite 6 examples, they considered themselves less confident than those who asked to come up with only 6 examples (see Table 3.1). A similar result occurred when participants were asked to recall inconfident behaviors – participants who were asked to come up with 12 examples of insecurity considered themselves more confident than those who were only asked to come up with 6 examples of insecurity (see Table 3.1).
People's judgment depends not only on the sheer number of examples collected, but also on how easy it is to collect them.
Similarly, people's attitudes are affected by the ease with which it is to come up with a reason to approve. For example, participants are asked to come up with arguments that support a particular view (such as that public transportation is good). Participants who asked to come up with a small number of arguments agreed less with this view than those who asked to come up with a small number of arguments (Wanke, Bless, & Biller, 1996). Obviously, when we have difficulty coming up with arguments to support a point of view, we lose confidence in that view.
One-sided questions and recall guidance allow us to focus our attention directly and unambiguously on a biased subset of knowledge, and thus bias our judgments. Similar deviations will appear in more subtle ways.
7
Explain the effect
Consider why it might be a good thing for firefighters to enjoy taking risks? Most people can come up with a compelling explanation — after all, firefighters must be willing to enter a house that catches fire, and if they are not willing to take the risk, they cannot do their job effectively.
But, suppose asking you, why do firefighters like to take risks can be a bad thing? Most people can also come up with a convincing explanation — if firefighters take unnecessary risks and rush into a burning house and climb out of a high-rise window without proper precautions, they are putting their lives in the same danger as those they are trying to save.
This shows that we can not only come up with some opposing theories, but also the arguments that support these theories, and we have gradually come to believe these theories.
A series of studies confirm these explanatory effects. In experiments, people were asked to explain why good firefighters tended to take fewer risks than poorer firefighters, or why good firefighters tended to take more risks (Anderson & Sechler, 1986).
Participants who had already explained that "being willing to take risks is a good thing for firefighters" were more convinced that it would be better for firefighters to be willing to take risks than those who explained the opposite.
In addition, when participants were asked to evaluate applicants who applied for firefighter positions based on their self-introductions, these theoretical changes affected participants' evaluation of applicants. Participants who explained that being willing to take risks were good rated those who loved to take risks were rated higher, but those who explained that being willing to take risks were bad gave the opposite result — they rated cautious applicants higher.
When people explain other causal events, they get similar results. For example, it's easy to explain why extroverts are more likely to achieve academic success than introverts (e.g., extroverts can rely on their social skills to get help from professors and friends). One can also easily explain the opposite causality, i.e. why introverts are more likely to have academic achievement than extroverts (e.g., introverts spend more time studying than attending dances). When people are asked to explain one of two possible causal relationships, they both think that the kind of causality they are interpreting is more likely (Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990).
Why do people still believe the point of view that they have explained, knowing that there is evidence to support the opposite view? The most plausible explanation is that explanatory behavior makes the knowledge supporting the explanation highly readily available, and when evaluating the credibility of the events explained, we rely on the availability of beliefs that support the explanation.
But we don't realize that these beliefs about accessibility are not a representative sample of the knowledge we have on this issue. Because in trying to explain a one-sided causal relationship, we use the biased part of the knowledge.
8
Stick to the beliefs that have been refuted
Suppose I tell you that a quiz you took yesterday showed that you have unusual social insights. Then give you some time to think and accept that information. After a while, I'll tell you it's just a joke, that the test was deceitful, and that the results were made up. Now, how do you see your social insight?
Obviously, the information about your social insight has been completely denied, and you don't know anything new about insight; then, you should feel no different from before. But research has found that earlier statements seem to have an impact on your perception of yourself, and people will hold on to it even if they find that the earlier evidence is not true.
In one study, participants were placed in the same situation they had imagined (Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975).
First, participants were asked to distinguish between true and false suicide cases, and then gave false feedback on the participants' reactions: tell one part of the participants that they did well, tell the other part of the participants that they did a bad job, and tell the last part of the participants that they did a good job.
Participants were then told that the feedback was all wrong and that they had simply randomly given positive, neutral, or negative feedback.
Although the experimenters have explained that the previous feedback is not credible, the feedback still affects the participants' self-perception.
Participants who received positive feedback still felt that they performed better at tasking to distinguish between suicide events; and that they were more sensitive to such tasks than those who received neutral feedback.
Participants who received negative feedback also consistently believed that they performed relatively poorly on this task, as well as related sensory tasks.
Accessibility heuristics can explain this phenomenon of insisting on refuted beliefs.
The feedback you get is that you have unusual sensitivities, which can lead you to try to apply that information to your perception of yourself.
You may recall how you sensed a crisis in their marriage before your neighbor revealed to you about their marital discord; how you prejudged that your friend had planned a surprise ball for you; and why you always knew what gifts were most satisfying to your mother.
All of this initially obtained information, even if later learned to be false, will continue to influence people's self-judgment because they are still readily available information.
There is no direct evidence that this persistence effect is due to increased accessibility to information. But, as discussed earlier, there is already clear evidence that self-related information, if more readily available, is more likely to affect self-perception.
People will cling to the rebuttaled beliefs, and recognizing this phenomenon helps us understand why slander is so harmful. Once an allegation is discredited, even if the allegation is not established, it is extremely difficult to restore the reputation of the accused.
9
imagine
John Carroll, 1978
If an easily imagined event can be judged to be more likely to occur, then deliberately imagining an event can increase its availability and make it seem more likely.
A series of studies confirm the consequences of this imagination. Ask participants to imagine being arrested for a crime, winning a free trip to Hawaii, enjoying the benefits of cable TELEVISION (Gregory, Cialdini, & Carperter, 1982).
Later, participants who imagined these events believed that they could happen more than those who did not. Participants who imagine enjoying a cable TV scenario are more willing to order cable channels than those who have only heard of the benefits of cable TV.
Imagining the outcome can increase the expectation of the probability that its outcome will occur.
Similar results appeared in another study, in which participants were asked to imagine themselves succeeding or failing in an anagram task and interpreting the results they imagined. Those who imagined success had higher expectations of their own performance than those who imagined failure; the actual behavior of the participants was also influenced by the imagined results: participants who imagined themselves successfully completing the task actually performed better than those who imagined failure (Sherman et al., 1981).
Imagination can also enhance people's expectations of the likelihood of social events in which they are not involved, such as the campaign of a particular political candidate (Carrol, 1978).
Accessibility heuristics can be used to illustrate the findings of the above studies. After people have imagined one thing, the imaginary plot is vividly remembered, so these plots are more accessible. Relying on this imaginary accessibility to evaluate the probability of an event occurring will make us think that this imaginary thing is more likely to happen. Sometimes, if the current image of accessibility is as rich and vivid as what actually happened in our memory, we mistakenly take that imagination seriously.
The limitations of imagination
Jim Sherman Jim Sherman, Robert Cialdini, Donna Schwartzman & Kim Reynolds, Kim Reynolds, 1985
What would happen if the outcome of an event is hard to imagine?
Imagining an outcome does not guarantee a higher probability of its occurrence; if the outcome of an event is difficult to imagine, the effort to imagine reduces one's expectations of the likelihood of its occurrence.
summary
To the man with the hammer in his hand, every problem is like a nail. —Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger, Public Account: The Basic, Universal Wisdom of North Hill Investment Theory and Its Relationship to Investment Management and Business
What is readily available is not necessarily reliable.
What you pay more attention to, you will remember what you will be influenced by.
Speak with facts. It is better to statistically facts than to memorize your own experiences.
Expand access to information and collect a wide range of opinions. Instead of constantly looking for evidence of a bias.
Build a multi-faceted mindset model.
Whether it is treating oneself or looking at others, we collect evidence from both positive and negative aspects to fully demonstrate. Both positive and negative thinking are indispensable.
Read more
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