cognitive illusions

Study examines common cognitive biases (have you tried this brain teaser?) and ways to mitigate them

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Pic: Get­ty Images

A fas­ci­nat­ing new study, Tver­sky and Kahneman’s Cog­ni­tive Illu­sions: Who Can Solve Them, and Why?, probes into the cog­ni­tive “heuris­tics and bias­es” researched by Daniel Kah­ne­man and Amos Tver­sky since the late 1960s.

If you have nev­er encoun­tered the “Lin­da brain teas­er” before, please give it a try:

Lin­da is 31 years old, sin­gle, out­spo­ken, and very bright. She majored in phi­los­o­phy. As a stu­dent, she was deeply con­cerned with issues of dis­crim­i­na­tion and social jus­tice, and also par­tic­i­pat­ed in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which state­ment is more probable?

(a) Lin­da is a bank teller.

(b) Lin­da is a bank teller and is active in the fem­i­nist movement.

 

Quick! What’s your answer? [Read more…] about Study exam­ines com­mon cog­ni­tive bias­es (have you tried this brain teas­er?) and ways to mit­i­gate them

Update: Time to become mental capitalists and invest in our brains?

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Time for the Novem­ber edi­tion of the month­ly Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing a wealth of resources and insights on how to invest in our brains, includ­ing top­ics such as brain health, med­i­ta­tion, neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy, brain train­ing games, chemo brain, dyslex­ia, neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty, cog­ni­tive bias­es, stress, and more. Not to for­get a cou­ple of fun teasers. Enjoy!

Brain Fit­ness Q&A Sessions:

The Big Picture:

New Research:

New Books:

Brain Teasers:

Thank you for your inter­est and atten­tion and have a great December.

How cognitive illusions blind us to reason

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Fun arti­cle by Daniel Kah­ne­man based on his new book,Think­ing, Fast and Slow.

How cog­ni­tive illu­sions blind us to rea­son (The Guardian):

Why do Wall Street traders have such faith in their pow­ers of pre­dic­tion, when their suc­cess is large­ly down to chance? Daniel Kah­ne­man explains. 

- “Look­ing back, the most strik­ing part of the sto­ry is that our knowl­edge of the gen­er­al rule that we could not pre­dict had no effect on our con­fi­dence in indi­vid­ual cas­es. We were reluc­tant to infer the par­tic­u­lar from the gen­er­al. Sub­jec­tive con­fi­dence in a judg­ment is not a rea­soned eval­u­a­tion of the prob­a­bil­i­ty that this judg­ment is cor­rect. Con­fi­dence is a feel­ing, which reflects the coher­ence of the infor­ma­tion and the cog­ni­tive ease of pro­cess­ing it. It is wise to take admis­sions of uncer­tain­ty seri­ous­ly, but dec­la­ra­tions of high con­fi­dence main­ly tell you that an indi­vid­ual has con­struct­ed a coher­ent sto­ry in his mind, not nec­es­sar­i­ly that the sto­ry is true.” …

- “The sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of traders is that they are mak­ing sen­si­ble edu­cat­ed guess­es in a sit­u­a­tion of great uncer­tain­ty. In high­ly effi­cient mar­kets, how­ev­er, edu­cat­ed guess­es are no more accu­rate than blind guesses.”

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