#cognitive-biases — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cognitive-biases, aggregated by home.social.
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Book Review: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
You are not as rational as you think you are. Neither am I. That is the entire premise of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and for investors, it might be the most useful sentence in any book on this shelf.
Published in 2008 and revised and expanded in 2010, Predictably Irrational is one of the founding texts of popular behavioral economics. Ariely’s argument is simple and devastating: human beings do not make random mistakes. We make the same mistakes, in the same directions, over and over, which means our irrationality is predictable, and therefore manageable, once you see it.
If you have ever bought a stock at the top because everyone else was buying, sold at the bottom because the pain got unbearable, or held a loser for years because admitting the mistake felt worse than the loss, this book is about you.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Book Summary
Predictably Irrational walks through a series of experiments, most of them run by Ariely and his colleagues on college students, that expose the hidden forces shaping our decisions. Each chapter takes one force, demonstrates it with a clever experiment, and shows how it leaks into everyday life. The throughline: standard economics assumes we are rational calculators, but we are emotional, comparative, social creatures shaped by context in ways we never notice. The good news is that the patterns are consistent enough to study, and once you know the traps, you can design around them.
Who is Dan Ariely?
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and one of the best-known popularizers of behavioral economics alongside Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Predictably Irrational was a New York Times bestseller, and Ariely went on to write several follow-ups, including The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.
His interest in the subject was personal: as a teenager in Israel, severe burns put him in hospitals for years, where he became fascinated by how irrationally people behave around pain and decisions. That experience became a research career, and Predictably Irrational is its most readable product.
Lessons From Predictably Irrational
The book is organized around a handful of big ideas. Here are the ones that matter most to investors.
Anchoring and arbitrary coherence. The first number you encounter sets the reference point for everything after it, even when the number is meaningless. Students who wrote down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers before bidding on items bid higher when their digits were higher. Everyone knew the digits were random, and it still worked. Now think about stock prices: the 52-week high is an anchor, and the price you paid is an anchor. Your brain treats them as meaningful reference points, quietly distorting every buy and sell decision. This is why having a valuation framework matters more than having a price target.
The zero-price effect. “Free!” is not just a low price. It is an emotional trigger that shuts down rational comparison. People will choose a free item they do not need over a nearly-free item that is objectively better. Investors do this too: free trades made everyone trade more, and “zero commission” is not zero cost if it turns you into a hyperactive trader. The price of free is your attention and your discipline.
Social norms vs. market norms. The moment money enters a relationship, generosity evaporates and everything becomes transactional. Ariely’s experiments show people will work harder for a favor than for small amounts of cash, because cash moves the interaction into market norms. For investors, the lesson is about advisors, newsletters, and “free” stock tips: once someone is paid to influence your decisions, treat their advice as a market transaction, which it is.
The decoy effect. When choosing between two options, adding a third option that is clearly worse than one of them makes that one look much more attractive. Marketers use this constantly in pricing tiers. In investing, watch for it in fund marketing: the expensive, mediocre fund exists partly to make the slightly-less-expensive one look like a deal. Compare every investment against the alternative of buying the index, not against the decoy sitting next to it.
Ownership and the endowment effect. We overvalue what we own: people demand far more to sell an item they were given than they would pay to buy it. This is the reason investors hold losing positions for years. The stock in your portfolio is not worth more than the identical stock in someone else’s. If you would not buy it today at today’s price, you should not own it today. The endowment effect is the single most expensive bias in this book for a stock picker.
Expectations shape experience. What you expect to taste, feel, or earn changes what you actually experience. Price tags change how much people enjoy wine, and reputation changes how much investors trust a stock. Be skeptical of your own enthusiasm: some of what you “see” in a beloved company is your expectations doing the seeing.
The pain of paying and procrastination. Paying hurts, and we procrastinate on anything with upfront costs and delayed benefits. Ariely’s chapter on self-control, with its experiments on deadlines, applies directly to rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting, the portfolio maintenance investors put off forever. His finding: pre-commitment beats willpower. Automate the good decisions so your future self cannot negotiate out of them.
Work through Predictably Irrational one chapter at a time; it rewards a slow read.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
The fair criticisms of Predictably Irrational have grown louder since it was published, and they deserve a hearing. The biggest is the replication crisis in behavioral economics and psychology more broadly: a number of famous findings in the field have failed to replicate when other researchers tried to reproduce them. Not every experiment in this book has been re-run, and readers should treat individual study results as suggestive rather than settled, even when the broader patterns hold up.
More specifically, questions were raised in 2021 about the data behind a 2012 paper Ariely co-authored on honesty, after an analysis suggested the data had been fabricated. Ariely denied any wrongdoing, said the data had come from an outside company, and noted that he had not collected it himself. The episode does not directly concern this book’s experiments, but it is part of the honest accounting a review should give: some of the shine has come off the field’s early certainty.
A smaller criticism: the experiments were mostly run on college students, and the leap from lab games to real financial decisions is sometimes bigger than the storytelling admits. Take the insights as directionally true, not as laws of physics.
Who is This Book For?
Predictably Irrational is for any investor who wants to understand their own worst enemy: themselves. It pairs naturally with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the deeper and more rigorous treatment of the same territory, and with Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving, which we reviewed here. If you have read those, this book is the most entertaining entry point of the three, and the experiments make the biases stick in a way abstractions do not.
It is also for anyone who designs choices for a living: marketers, managers, policymakers. But on this site, the audience is investors, and the pitch is simple. Your portfolio’s returns are downstream of your decisions, and your decisions are downstream of biases you cannot feel operating. This book names them. It also sits comfortably on our list of the 7 Best Books on the Psychology of Money.
It is not for readers who want a systematic investing framework. This is a book about how minds work, not about how to value companies.
Final Thoughts
Predictably Irrational will not make you rational. Nothing will. What it does is replace your vague sense that “emotions affect investing” with a specific catalog of traps, each with a name and a countermeasure. Once you can name them, you start catching them in your own brokerage account.
The replication concerns are real, and this review would be dishonest without them. But the book’s core message has survived the field’s troubles intact: your mistakes are not random, they are systematic, and systematic mistakes can be managed. For an investor, that is one of the highest-leverage insights in print.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
#BehavioralEconomics #Books #CognitiveBiases #DanAriely #InvestingPsychology -
Book Review: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
You are not as rational as you think you are. Neither am I. That is the entire premise of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and for investors, it might be the most useful sentence in any book on this shelf.
Published in 2008 and revised and expanded in 2010, Predictably Irrational is one of the founding texts of popular behavioral economics. Ariely’s argument is simple and devastating: human beings do not make random mistakes. We make the same mistakes, in the same directions, over and over, which means our irrationality is predictable, and therefore manageable, once you see it.
If you have ever bought a stock at the top because everyone else was buying, sold at the bottom because the pain got unbearable, or held a loser for years because admitting the mistake felt worse than the loss, this book is about you.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Book Summary
Predictably Irrational walks through a series of experiments, most of them run by Ariely and his colleagues on college students, that expose the hidden forces shaping our decisions. Each chapter takes one force, demonstrates it with a clever experiment, and shows how it leaks into everyday life. The throughline: standard economics assumes we are rational calculators, but we are emotional, comparative, social creatures shaped by context in ways we never notice. The good news is that the patterns are consistent enough to study, and once you know the traps, you can design around them.
Who is Dan Ariely?
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and one of the best-known popularizers of behavioral economics alongside Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Predictably Irrational was a New York Times bestseller, and Ariely went on to write several follow-ups, including The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.
His interest in the subject was personal: as a teenager in Israel, severe burns put him in hospitals for years, where he became fascinated by how irrationally people behave around pain and decisions. That experience became a research career, and Predictably Irrational is its most readable product.
Lessons From Predictably Irrational
The book is organized around a handful of big ideas. Here are the ones that matter most to investors.
Anchoring and arbitrary coherence. The first number you encounter sets the reference point for everything after it, even when the number is meaningless. Students who wrote down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers before bidding on items bid higher when their digits were higher. Everyone knew the digits were random, and it still worked. Now think about stock prices: the 52-week high is an anchor, and the price you paid is an anchor. Your brain treats them as meaningful reference points, quietly distorting every buy and sell decision. This is why having a valuation framework matters more than having a price target.
The zero-price effect. “Free!” is not just a low price. It is an emotional trigger that shuts down rational comparison. People will choose a free item they do not need over a nearly-free item that is objectively better. Investors do this too: free trades made everyone trade more, and “zero commission” is not zero cost if it turns you into a hyperactive trader. The price of free is your attention and your discipline.
Social norms vs. market norms. The moment money enters a relationship, generosity evaporates and everything becomes transactional. Ariely’s experiments show people will work harder for a favor than for small amounts of cash, because cash moves the interaction into market norms. For investors, the lesson is about advisors, newsletters, and “free” stock tips: once someone is paid to influence your decisions, treat their advice as a market transaction, which it is.
The decoy effect. When choosing between two options, adding a third option that is clearly worse than one of them makes that one look much more attractive. Marketers use this constantly in pricing tiers. In investing, watch for it in fund marketing: the expensive, mediocre fund exists partly to make the slightly-less-expensive one look like a deal. Compare every investment against the alternative of buying the index, not against the decoy sitting next to it.
Ownership and the endowment effect. We overvalue what we own: people demand far more to sell an item they were given than they would pay to buy it. This is the reason investors hold losing positions for years. The stock in your portfolio is not worth more than the identical stock in someone else’s. If you would not buy it today at today’s price, you should not own it today. The endowment effect is the single most expensive bias in this book for a stock picker.
Expectations shape experience. What you expect to taste, feel, or earn changes what you actually experience. Price tags change how much people enjoy wine, and reputation changes how much investors trust a stock. Be skeptical of your own enthusiasm: some of what you “see” in a beloved company is your expectations doing the seeing.
The pain of paying and procrastination. Paying hurts, and we procrastinate on anything with upfront costs and delayed benefits. Ariely’s chapter on self-control, with its experiments on deadlines, applies directly to rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting, the portfolio maintenance investors put off forever. His finding: pre-commitment beats willpower. Automate the good decisions so your future self cannot negotiate out of them.
Work through Predictably Irrational one chapter at a time; it rewards a slow read.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
The fair criticisms of Predictably Irrational have grown louder since it was published, and they deserve a hearing. The biggest is the replication crisis in behavioral economics and psychology more broadly: a number of famous findings in the field have failed to replicate when other researchers tried to reproduce them. Not every experiment in this book has been re-run, and readers should treat individual study results as suggestive rather than settled, even when the broader patterns hold up.
More specifically, questions were raised in 2021 about the data behind a 2012 paper Ariely co-authored on honesty, after an analysis suggested the data had been fabricated. Ariely denied any wrongdoing, said the data had come from an outside company, and noted that he had not collected it himself. The episode does not directly concern this book’s experiments, but it is part of the honest accounting a review should give: some of the shine has come off the field’s early certainty.
A smaller criticism: the experiments were mostly run on college students, and the leap from lab games to real financial decisions is sometimes bigger than the storytelling admits. Take the insights as directionally true, not as laws of physics.
Who is This Book For?
Predictably Irrational is for any investor who wants to understand their own worst enemy: themselves. It pairs naturally with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the deeper and more rigorous treatment of the same territory, and with Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving, which we reviewed here. If you have read those, this book is the most entertaining entry point of the three, and the experiments make the biases stick in a way abstractions do not.
It is also for anyone who designs choices for a living: marketers, managers, policymakers. But on this site, the audience is investors, and the pitch is simple. Your portfolio’s returns are downstream of your decisions, and your decisions are downstream of biases you cannot feel operating. This book names them. It also sits comfortably on our list of the 7 Best Books on the Psychology of Money.
It is not for readers who want a systematic investing framework. This is a book about how minds work, not about how to value companies.
Final Thoughts
Predictably Irrational will not make you rational. Nothing will. What it does is replace your vague sense that “emotions affect investing” with a specific catalog of traps, each with a name and a countermeasure. Once you can name them, you start catching them in your own brokerage account.
The replication concerns are real, and this review would be dishonest without them. But the book’s core message has survived the field’s troubles intact: your mistakes are not random, they are systematic, and systematic mistakes can be managed. For an investor, that is one of the highest-leverage insights in print.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
#BehavioralEconomics #Books #CognitiveBiases #DanAriely #InvestingPsychology -
Book Review: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
You are not as rational as you think you are. Neither am I. That is the entire premise of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and for investors, it might be the most useful sentence in any book on this shelf.
Published in 2008 and revised and expanded in 2010, Predictably Irrational is one of the founding texts of popular behavioral economics. Ariely’s argument is simple and devastating: human beings do not make random mistakes. We make the same mistakes, in the same directions, over and over, which means our irrationality is predictable, and therefore manageable, once you see it.
If you have ever bought a stock at the top because everyone else was buying, sold at the bottom because the pain got unbearable, or held a loser for years because admitting the mistake felt worse than the loss, this book is about you.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Book Summary
Predictably Irrational walks through a series of experiments, most of them run by Ariely and his colleagues on college students, that expose the hidden forces shaping our decisions. Each chapter takes one force, demonstrates it with a clever experiment, and shows how it leaks into everyday life. The throughline: standard economics assumes we are rational calculators, but we are emotional, comparative, social creatures shaped by context in ways we never notice. The good news is that the patterns are consistent enough to study, and once you know the traps, you can design around them.
Who is Dan Ariely?
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and one of the best-known popularizers of behavioral economics alongside Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Predictably Irrational was a New York Times bestseller, and Ariely went on to write several follow-ups, including The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.
His interest in the subject was personal: as a teenager in Israel, severe burns put him in hospitals for years, where he became fascinated by how irrationally people behave around pain and decisions. That experience became a research career, and Predictably Irrational is its most readable product.
Lessons From Predictably Irrational
The book is organized around a handful of big ideas. Here are the ones that matter most to investors.
Anchoring and arbitrary coherence. The first number you encounter sets the reference point for everything after it, even when the number is meaningless. Students who wrote down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers before bidding on items bid higher when their digits were higher. Everyone knew the digits were random, and it still worked. Now think about stock prices: the 52-week high is an anchor, and the price you paid is an anchor. Your brain treats them as meaningful reference points, quietly distorting every buy and sell decision. This is why having a valuation framework matters more than having a price target.
The zero-price effect. “Free!” is not just a low price. It is an emotional trigger that shuts down rational comparison. People will choose a free item they do not need over a nearly-free item that is objectively better. Investors do this too: free trades made everyone trade more, and “zero commission” is not zero cost if it turns you into a hyperactive trader. The price of free is your attention and your discipline.
Social norms vs. market norms. The moment money enters a relationship, generosity evaporates and everything becomes transactional. Ariely’s experiments show people will work harder for a favor than for small amounts of cash, because cash moves the interaction into market norms. For investors, the lesson is about advisors, newsletters, and “free” stock tips: once someone is paid to influence your decisions, treat their advice as a market transaction, which it is.
The decoy effect. When choosing between two options, adding a third option that is clearly worse than one of them makes that one look much more attractive. Marketers use this constantly in pricing tiers. In investing, watch for it in fund marketing: the expensive, mediocre fund exists partly to make the slightly-less-expensive one look like a deal. Compare every investment against the alternative of buying the index, not against the decoy sitting next to it.
Ownership and the endowment effect. We overvalue what we own: people demand far more to sell an item they were given than they would pay to buy it. This is the reason investors hold losing positions for years. The stock in your portfolio is not worth more than the identical stock in someone else’s. If you would not buy it today at today’s price, you should not own it today. The endowment effect is the single most expensive bias in this book for a stock picker.
Expectations shape experience. What you expect to taste, feel, or earn changes what you actually experience. Price tags change how much people enjoy wine, and reputation changes how much investors trust a stock. Be skeptical of your own enthusiasm: some of what you “see” in a beloved company is your expectations doing the seeing.
The pain of paying and procrastination. Paying hurts, and we procrastinate on anything with upfront costs and delayed benefits. Ariely’s chapter on self-control, with its experiments on deadlines, applies directly to rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting, the portfolio maintenance investors put off forever. His finding: pre-commitment beats willpower. Automate the good decisions so your future self cannot negotiate out of them.
Work through Predictably Irrational one chapter at a time; it rewards a slow read.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
The fair criticisms of Predictably Irrational have grown louder since it was published, and they deserve a hearing. The biggest is the replication crisis in behavioral economics and psychology more broadly: a number of famous findings in the field have failed to replicate when other researchers tried to reproduce them. Not every experiment in this book has been re-run, and readers should treat individual study results as suggestive rather than settled, even when the broader patterns hold up.
More specifically, questions were raised in 2021 about the data behind a 2012 paper Ariely co-authored on honesty, after an analysis suggested the data had been fabricated. Ariely denied any wrongdoing, said the data had come from an outside company, and noted that he had not collected it himself. The episode does not directly concern this book’s experiments, but it is part of the honest accounting a review should give: some of the shine has come off the field’s early certainty.
A smaller criticism: the experiments were mostly run on college students, and the leap from lab games to real financial decisions is sometimes bigger than the storytelling admits. Take the insights as directionally true, not as laws of physics.
Who is This Book For?
Predictably Irrational is for any investor who wants to understand their own worst enemy: themselves. It pairs naturally with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the deeper and more rigorous treatment of the same territory, and with Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving, which we reviewed here. If you have read those, this book is the most entertaining entry point of the three, and the experiments make the biases stick in a way abstractions do not.
It is also for anyone who designs choices for a living: marketers, managers, policymakers. But on this site, the audience is investors, and the pitch is simple. Your portfolio’s returns are downstream of your decisions, and your decisions are downstream of biases you cannot feel operating. This book names them. It also sits comfortably on our list of the 7 Best Books on the Psychology of Money.
It is not for readers who want a systematic investing framework. This is a book about how minds work, not about how to value companies.
Final Thoughts
Predictably Irrational will not make you rational. Nothing will. What it does is replace your vague sense that “emotions affect investing” with a specific catalog of traps, each with a name and a countermeasure. Once you can name them, you start catching them in your own brokerage account.
The replication concerns are real, and this review would be dishonest without them. But the book’s core message has survived the field’s troubles intact: your mistakes are not random, they are systematic, and systematic mistakes can be managed. For an investor, that is one of the highest-leverage insights in print.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
#BehavioralEconomics #Books #CognitiveBiases #DanAriely #InvestingPsychology -
Book Review: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
You are not as rational as you think you are. Neither am I. That is the entire premise of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and for investors, it might be the most useful sentence in any book on this shelf.
Published in 2008 and revised and expanded in 2010, Predictably Irrational is one of the founding texts of popular behavioral economics. Ariely’s argument is simple and devastating: human beings do not make random mistakes. We make the same mistakes, in the same directions, over and over, which means our irrationality is predictable, and therefore manageable, once you see it.
If you have ever bought a stock at the top because everyone else was buying, sold at the bottom because the pain got unbearable, or held a loser for years because admitting the mistake felt worse than the loss, this book is about you.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Book Summary
Predictably Irrational walks through a series of experiments, most of them run by Ariely and his colleagues on college students, that expose the hidden forces shaping our decisions. Each chapter takes one force, demonstrates it with a clever experiment, and shows how it leaks into everyday life. The throughline: standard economics assumes we are rational calculators, but we are emotional, comparative, social creatures shaped by context in ways we never notice. The good news is that the patterns are consistent enough to study, and once you know the traps, you can design around them.
Who is Dan Ariely?
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and one of the best-known popularizers of behavioral economics alongside Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Predictably Irrational was a New York Times bestseller, and Ariely went on to write several follow-ups, including The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.
His interest in the subject was personal: as a teenager in Israel, severe burns put him in hospitals for years, where he became fascinated by how irrationally people behave around pain and decisions. That experience became a research career, and Predictably Irrational is its most readable product.
Lessons From Predictably Irrational
The book is organized around a handful of big ideas. Here are the ones that matter most to investors.
Anchoring and arbitrary coherence. The first number you encounter sets the reference point for everything after it, even when the number is meaningless. Students who wrote down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers before bidding on items bid higher when their digits were higher. Everyone knew the digits were random, and it still worked. Now think about stock prices: the 52-week high is an anchor, and the price you paid is an anchor. Your brain treats them as meaningful reference points, quietly distorting every buy and sell decision. This is why having a valuation framework matters more than having a price target.
The zero-price effect. “Free!” is not just a low price. It is an emotional trigger that shuts down rational comparison. People will choose a free item they do not need over a nearly-free item that is objectively better. Investors do this too: free trades made everyone trade more, and “zero commission” is not zero cost if it turns you into a hyperactive trader. The price of free is your attention and your discipline.
Social norms vs. market norms. The moment money enters a relationship, generosity evaporates and everything becomes transactional. Ariely’s experiments show people will work harder for a favor than for small amounts of cash, because cash moves the interaction into market norms. For investors, the lesson is about advisors, newsletters, and “free” stock tips: once someone is paid to influence your decisions, treat their advice as a market transaction, which it is.
The decoy effect. When choosing between two options, adding a third option that is clearly worse than one of them makes that one look much more attractive. Marketers use this constantly in pricing tiers. In investing, watch for it in fund marketing: the expensive, mediocre fund exists partly to make the slightly-less-expensive one look like a deal. Compare every investment against the alternative of buying the index, not against the decoy sitting next to it.
Ownership and the endowment effect. We overvalue what we own: people demand far more to sell an item they were given than they would pay to buy it. This is the reason investors hold losing positions for years. The stock in your portfolio is not worth more than the identical stock in someone else’s. If you would not buy it today at today’s price, you should not own it today. The endowment effect is the single most expensive bias in this book for a stock picker.
Expectations shape experience. What you expect to taste, feel, or earn changes what you actually experience. Price tags change how much people enjoy wine, and reputation changes how much investors trust a stock. Be skeptical of your own enthusiasm: some of what you “see” in a beloved company is your expectations doing the seeing.
The pain of paying and procrastination. Paying hurts, and we procrastinate on anything with upfront costs and delayed benefits. Ariely’s chapter on self-control, with its experiments on deadlines, applies directly to rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting, the portfolio maintenance investors put off forever. His finding: pre-commitment beats willpower. Automate the good decisions so your future self cannot negotiate out of them.
Work through Predictably Irrational one chapter at a time; it rewards a slow read.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
The fair criticisms of Predictably Irrational have grown louder since it was published, and they deserve a hearing. The biggest is the replication crisis in behavioral economics and psychology more broadly: a number of famous findings in the field have failed to replicate when other researchers tried to reproduce them. Not every experiment in this book has been re-run, and readers should treat individual study results as suggestive rather than settled, even when the broader patterns hold up.
More specifically, questions were raised in 2021 about the data behind a 2012 paper Ariely co-authored on honesty, after an analysis suggested the data had been fabricated. Ariely denied any wrongdoing, said the data had come from an outside company, and noted that he had not collected it himself. The episode does not directly concern this book’s experiments, but it is part of the honest accounting a review should give: some of the shine has come off the field’s early certainty.
A smaller criticism: the experiments were mostly run on college students, and the leap from lab games to real financial decisions is sometimes bigger than the storytelling admits. Take the insights as directionally true, not as laws of physics.
Who is This Book For?
Predictably Irrational is for any investor who wants to understand their own worst enemy: themselves. It pairs naturally with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the deeper and more rigorous treatment of the same territory, and with Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving, which we reviewed here. If you have read those, this book is the most entertaining entry point of the three, and the experiments make the biases stick in a way abstractions do not.
It is also for anyone who designs choices for a living: marketers, managers, policymakers. But on this site, the audience is investors, and the pitch is simple. Your portfolio’s returns are downstream of your decisions, and your decisions are downstream of biases you cannot feel operating. This book names them. It also sits comfortably on our list of the 7 Best Books on the Psychology of Money.
It is not for readers who want a systematic investing framework. This is a book about how minds work, not about how to value companies.
Final Thoughts
Predictably Irrational will not make you rational. Nothing will. What it does is replace your vague sense that “emotions affect investing” with a specific catalog of traps, each with a name and a countermeasure. Once you can name them, you start catching them in your own brokerage account.
The replication concerns are real, and this review would be dishonest without them. But the book’s core message has survived the field’s troubles intact: your mistakes are not random, they are systematic, and systematic mistakes can be managed. For an investor, that is one of the highest-leverage insights in print.
Buy Predictably Irrational on Amazon
#BehavioralEconomics #Books #CognitiveBiases #DanAriely #InvestingPsychology -
if you ever wondered how many cognitive errors you can trip over, please be welcome to discover this comprehensive and at the same time aesthetically pleasing graphic.
they also integrated a rough categorization system that i find somewhat helpful.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
#biases #socialPsychology #cognitiveBiases #kahneman #tversky #heuristics
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if you ever wondered how many cognitive errors you can trip over, please be welcome to discover this comprehensive and at the same time aesthetically pleasing graphic.
they also integrated a rough categorization system that i find somewhat helpful.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
#biases #socialPsychology #cognitiveBiases #kahneman #tversky #heuristics
-
if you ever wondered how many cognitive errors you can trip over, please be welcome to discover this comprehensive and at the same time aesthetically pleasing graphic.
they also integrated a rough categorization system that i find somewhat helpful.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
#biases #socialPsychology #cognitiveBiases #kahneman #tversky #heuristics
-
if you ever wondered how many cognitive errors you can trip over, please be welcome to discover this comprehensive and at the same time aesthetically pleasing graphic.
they also integrated a rough categorization system that i find somewhat helpful.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
#biases #socialPsychology #cognitiveBiases #kahneman #tversky #heuristics
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DATE: September 8, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Cognitive biases and emotional triggers make AI-generated images highly deceptive
Emotionally charged AI-generated images may encourage social media users to respond before they critically assess whether the images are real, according to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior.
AI-generated images can now be produced quickly and cheaply, making it possible to create large amounts of realistic-looking material for social media. Some images are paired with emotional captions and distributed through networks of automated pages or content farms that seek attention, advertising revenue or user interaction.
Images may be particularly effective at attracting attention because they are processed quickly and can trigger emotional reactions before people examine details closely. A picture of an elderly couple, a neglected child or an apparently extraordinary achievement may prompt sympathy, anger or admiration. Those reactions can make users less likely to stop and ask whether the scene is authentic.
Márk Miskolczi of Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary analyzed public Facebook material collected between March 1 and May 1, 2025. The sample consisted of 146 AI-generated images and 8,922 user comments.
Miskolczi selected 12 public Facebook pages that regularly posted suspected AI-generated images. The pages covered themes such as nostalgia, rural life, elderly people, spirituality, everyday hardship and family relationships. Images were first examined using an eight-step manual system that looked for features such as distorted anatomy, unusual facial details, floating objects, impossible reflections, malformed writing and unnatural textures. Images were also checked with an online AI detector, and only those receiving an AI-probability score of at least 60% were included.
An initial database contained 11,547 comments. After comments believed to have been produced by automated accounts were removed, 9,082 remained. The researcher then excluded 160 comments considered incomplete or meaningless, leaving 8,922 comments for qualitative analysis. The comments were categorized, or coded, in stages to identify recurring topics, emotional responses and possible mental shortcuts involved in users’ reactions.
Five broad themes emerged in the images: emotion and nostalgia; empathy and compassion; extraordinary achievements and hobbies; birthdays and social problems; and religion and spirituality. The most common comment category was birthday wishes, with 1,980 comments (22.19%). Inspiring messages and encouragement accounted for 1,802 comments (20.20%). Religious content accounted for 1,490 comments (16.70%).
Many users responded as though the images represented real people or events. They expressed sympathy for older adults, shared memories of childhood, offered congratulations and posted religious blessings. The analysis suggested that several mental shortcuts, known as cognitive biases, may have contributed. Confirmation bias may lead people to accept images that fit their existing beliefs. Anchoring may make the first emotional reaction more influential than later inspection. Familiar themes may feel trustworthy, while large numbers of supportive comments may create the impression that the content has been socially verified.
The researcher found that images involving older people, nostalgic memories and apparent neglect often produced strong emotional reactions. Outrage-inducing content could also encourage comments while drawing attention away from visual inconsistencies. By contrast, some images involving inter-ethnic conflict or neglected birthdays attracted more skepticism or less engagement.
Miskolczi summarized: “This study examined how AI-generated images [AIGIs] on Facebook exploit users’ vulnerabilities, revealing their remarkable potential for digital deception… Emotional engagement was often accompanied by cognitive biases which together reduced users’ critical reflection.”
Some limitations are to be noted. The study was limited to public Facebook content, which may not reflect platform-specific or culturally embedded differences in how users on other networks engage with such images. Additionally, the manual frameworks used to detect AI images and automated comments have not yet been externally validated. Furthermore, the analysis inferred cognitive biases from the content of comments rather than measuring them directly in experiments. It also cannot establish exactly how many users genuinely believed the images were real, how many were responding ironically or whether the images changed their views or behavior.
The study, “The illusion of reality: How AI-generated images (AIGIs) are fooling social media users,” was authored by Márk Miskolczi.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AIGIdeception #CognitiveBiases #EmotionalTriggers #FakeImages #SocialMediaSafety #DigitalManipulation #Misinformation #AIethics #AIgeneratedImages #CriticalMedia literacy
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DATE: September 8, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Cognitive biases and emotional triggers make AI-generated images highly deceptive
Emotionally charged AI-generated images may encourage social media users to respond before they critically assess whether the images are real, according to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior.
AI-generated images can now be produced quickly and cheaply, making it possible to create large amounts of realistic-looking material for social media. Some images are paired with emotional captions and distributed through networks of automated pages or content farms that seek attention, advertising revenue or user interaction.
Images may be particularly effective at attracting attention because they are processed quickly and can trigger emotional reactions before people examine details closely. A picture of an elderly couple, a neglected child or an apparently extraordinary achievement may prompt sympathy, anger or admiration. Those reactions can make users less likely to stop and ask whether the scene is authentic.
Márk Miskolczi of Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary analyzed public Facebook material collected between March 1 and May 1, 2025. The sample consisted of 146 AI-generated images and 8,922 user comments.
Miskolczi selected 12 public Facebook pages that regularly posted suspected AI-generated images. The pages covered themes such as nostalgia, rural life, elderly people, spirituality, everyday hardship and family relationships. Images were first examined using an eight-step manual system that looked for features such as distorted anatomy, unusual facial details, floating objects, impossible reflections, malformed writing and unnatural textures. Images were also checked with an online AI detector, and only those receiving an AI-probability score of at least 60% were included.
An initial database contained 11,547 comments. After comments believed to have been produced by automated accounts were removed, 9,082 remained. The researcher then excluded 160 comments considered incomplete or meaningless, leaving 8,922 comments for qualitative analysis. The comments were categorized, or coded, in stages to identify recurring topics, emotional responses and possible mental shortcuts involved in users’ reactions.
Five broad themes emerged in the images: emotion and nostalgia; empathy and compassion; extraordinary achievements and hobbies; birthdays and social problems; and religion and spirituality. The most common comment category was birthday wishes, with 1,980 comments (22.19%). Inspiring messages and encouragement accounted for 1,802 comments (20.20%). Religious content accounted for 1,490 comments (16.70%).
Many users responded as though the images represented real people or events. They expressed sympathy for older adults, shared memories of childhood, offered congratulations and posted religious blessings. The analysis suggested that several mental shortcuts, known as cognitive biases, may have contributed. Confirmation bias may lead people to accept images that fit their existing beliefs. Anchoring may make the first emotional reaction more influential than later inspection. Familiar themes may feel trustworthy, while large numbers of supportive comments may create the impression that the content has been socially verified.
The researcher found that images involving older people, nostalgic memories and apparent neglect often produced strong emotional reactions. Outrage-inducing content could also encourage comments while drawing attention away from visual inconsistencies. By contrast, some images involving inter-ethnic conflict or neglected birthdays attracted more skepticism or less engagement.
Miskolczi summarized: “This study examined how AI-generated images [AIGIs] on Facebook exploit users’ vulnerabilities, revealing their remarkable potential for digital deception… Emotional engagement was often accompanied by cognitive biases which together reduced users’ critical reflection.”
Some limitations are to be noted. The study was limited to public Facebook content, which may not reflect platform-specific or culturally embedded differences in how users on other networks engage with such images. Additionally, the manual frameworks used to detect AI images and automated comments have not yet been externally validated. Furthermore, the analysis inferred cognitive biases from the content of comments rather than measuring them directly in experiments. It also cannot establish exactly how many users genuinely believed the images were real, how many were responding ironically or whether the images changed their views or behavior.
The study, “The illusion of reality: How AI-generated images (AIGIs) are fooling social media users,” was authored by Márk Miskolczi.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AIGIdeception #CognitiveBiases #EmotionalTriggers #FakeImages #SocialMediaSafety #DigitalManipulation #Misinformation #AIethics #AIgeneratedImages #CriticalMedia literacy
-
DATE: September 8, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Cognitive biases and emotional triggers make AI-generated images highly deceptive
Emotionally charged AI-generated images may encourage social media users to respond before they critically assess whether the images are real, according to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior.
AI-generated images can now be produced quickly and cheaply, making it possible to create large amounts of realistic-looking material for social media. Some images are paired with emotional captions and distributed through networks of automated pages or content farms that seek attention, advertising revenue or user interaction.
Images may be particularly effective at attracting attention because they are processed quickly and can trigger emotional reactions before people examine details closely. A picture of an elderly couple, a neglected child or an apparently extraordinary achievement may prompt sympathy, anger or admiration. Those reactions can make users less likely to stop and ask whether the scene is authentic.
Márk Miskolczi of Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary analyzed public Facebook material collected between March 1 and May 1, 2025. The sample consisted of 146 AI-generated images and 8,922 user comments.
Miskolczi selected 12 public Facebook pages that regularly posted suspected AI-generated images. The pages covered themes such as nostalgia, rural life, elderly people, spirituality, everyday hardship and family relationships. Images were first examined using an eight-step manual system that looked for features such as distorted anatomy, unusual facial details, floating objects, impossible reflections, malformed writing and unnatural textures. Images were also checked with an online AI detector, and only those receiving an AI-probability score of at least 60% were included.
An initial database contained 11,547 comments. After comments believed to have been produced by automated accounts were removed, 9,082 remained. The researcher then excluded 160 comments considered incomplete or meaningless, leaving 8,922 comments for qualitative analysis. The comments were categorized, or coded, in stages to identify recurring topics, emotional responses and possible mental shortcuts involved in users’ reactions.
Five broad themes emerged in the images: emotion and nostalgia; empathy and compassion; extraordinary achievements and hobbies; birthdays and social problems; and religion and spirituality. The most common comment category was birthday wishes, with 1,980 comments (22.19%). Inspiring messages and encouragement accounted for 1,802 comments (20.20%). Religious content accounted for 1,490 comments (16.70%).
Many users responded as though the images represented real people or events. They expressed sympathy for older adults, shared memories of childhood, offered congratulations and posted religious blessings. The analysis suggested that several mental shortcuts, known as cognitive biases, may have contributed. Confirmation bias may lead people to accept images that fit their existing beliefs. Anchoring may make the first emotional reaction more influential than later inspection. Familiar themes may feel trustworthy, while large numbers of supportive comments may create the impression that the content has been socially verified.
The researcher found that images involving older people, nostalgic memories and apparent neglect often produced strong emotional reactions. Outrage-inducing content could also encourage comments while drawing attention away from visual inconsistencies. By contrast, some images involving inter-ethnic conflict or neglected birthdays attracted more skepticism or less engagement.
Miskolczi summarized: “This study examined how AI-generated images [AIGIs] on Facebook exploit users’ vulnerabilities, revealing their remarkable potential for digital deception… Emotional engagement was often accompanied by cognitive biases which together reduced users’ critical reflection.”
Some limitations are to be noted. The study was limited to public Facebook content, which may not reflect platform-specific or culturally embedded differences in how users on other networks engage with such images. Additionally, the manual frameworks used to detect AI images and automated comments have not yet been externally validated. Furthermore, the analysis inferred cognitive biases from the content of comments rather than measuring them directly in experiments. It also cannot establish exactly how many users genuinely believed the images were real, how many were responding ironically or whether the images changed their views or behavior.
The study, “The illusion of reality: How AI-generated images (AIGIs) are fooling social media users,” was authored by Márk Miskolczi.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AIGIdeception #CognitiveBiases #EmotionalTriggers #FakeImages #SocialMediaSafety #DigitalManipulation #Misinformation #AIethics #AIgeneratedImages #CriticalMedia literacy
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Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
https://var0.xyz/posts/beyond-recall-and-the-illusion-of-competence.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446442
#HackerNews #BeyondRecall #IllusionOfCompetence #HackerNews #Insights #CognitiveBiases #Learning
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Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
https://var0.xyz/posts/beyond-recall-and-the-illusion-of-competence.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446442
#HackerNews #BeyondRecall #IllusionOfCompetence #HackerNews #Insights #CognitiveBiases #Learning
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Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
https://var0.xyz/posts/beyond-recall-and-the-illusion-of-competence.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446442
#HackerNews #BeyondRecall #IllusionOfCompetence #HackerNews #Insights #CognitiveBiases #Learning
-
Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
https://var0.xyz/posts/beyond-recall-and-the-illusion-of-competence.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446442
#HackerNews #BeyondRecall #IllusionOfCompetence #HackerNews #Insights #CognitiveBiases #Learning
-
(15 Aug) Scientists Identify a New Glitch in Human Thinking https://s.faithcollapsing.com/3emqx Archive: ais: https://archive.md/wip/Ogt9G ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/0fpus #biology #cognitive-biases #fallacies #psychology
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(15 Aug) Scientists Identify a New Glitch in Human Thinking https://s.faithcollapsing.com/3emqx Archive: ais: https://archive.md/wip/Ogt9G ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/0fpus #biology #cognitive-biases #fallacies #psychology
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(15 Aug) Scientists Identify a New Glitch in Human Thinking https://s.faithcollapsing.com/3emqx Archive: ais: https://archive.md/wip/Ogt9G ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/0fpus #biology #cognitive-biases #fallacies #psychology
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Going to a regional burn today (like #BurningMan but smaller and cuter). After half a dozen of these, I am struck by a pattern, which probably represents some basic group dynamics: the burns themselves are overwhelmingly welcoming and positive, while the communication about the event from the organizers is often scolding, sarcastic, and sometimes even a bit hostile.
I suspect the organizers spend a lot of time dealing with bullshit we plebs don't see much of, and--like cops--they end up seeing everyone through that lens. I think #communication here has some challenges.
-
Going to a regional burn today (like #BurningMan but smaller and cuter). After half a dozen of these, I am struck by a pattern, which probably represents some basic group dynamics: the burns themselves are overwhelmingly welcoming and positive, while the communication about the event from the organizers is often scolding, sarcastic, and sometimes even a bit hostile.
I suspect the organizers spend a lot of time dealing with bullshit we plebs don't see much of, and--like cops--they end up seeing everyone through that lens. I think #communication here has some challenges.
-
Going to a regional burn today (like #BurningMan but smaller and cuter). After half a dozen of these, I am struck by a pattern, which probably represents some basic group dynamics: the burns themselves are overwhelmingly welcoming and positive, while the communication about the event from the organizers is often scolding, sarcastic, and sometimes even a bit hostile.
I suspect the organizers spend a lot of time dealing with bullshit we plebs don't see much of, and--like cops--they end up seeing everyone through that lens. I think #communication here has some challenges.
-
Going to a regional burn today (like #BurningMan but smaller and cuter). After half a dozen of these, I am struck by a pattern, which probably represents some basic group dynamics: the burns themselves are overwhelmingly welcoming and positive, while the communication about the event from the organizers is often scolding, sarcastic, and sometimes even a bit hostile.
I suspect the organizers spend a lot of time dealing with bullshit we plebs don't see much of, and--like cops--they end up seeing everyone through that lens. I think #communication here has some challenges.
-
The illustration of various #CognitiveBiases that affect individuals and groups can be viewed here > https://bias.wiki
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I'm not posting this in agreement. Or not full agreement, anyway. It's been posted and shared on my feed in facebook. As a general principle: Absolutely. Your opinion about my experience is not as valid as my experience... usually.
The problem is that I'm a social scientist. That word "opinion" is carrying a lot of weight. If someone's ideas of what a non-lived experience is like are based on supposition, best guesses, and their own experience, then the graphic is valid: lived experience is much better.
However, if an "opinion" about my lived experience comes from the reported lived experiences from relatively representative thousand or so people, the opinion is probably more valid, for certain purposes/contexts.
"Validity" always has a context or target. No matter how much amazing research I have about a certain issue, my knowledge is never as good for an individual as that individual's lived experience. However, if "valid" means "generalizably true across lots of individuals," then one person's experience will never be as valid as a reasonable (lots of weight on that word) summation of many others' experiences. Another detail is whether one's interpretation of one's experiences (especially interpretation of causality) is necessarily more valid than interpretations by others who haven't lived the experience.
If you're feeling uncomfortable about this analysis, consider a parent whose child develops autism. The parent is fully convinced their kid's age 2 vaccinations were the cause. That parent has definitely had an experience, which included seeing their kid vaccinated, then seeing autism symptoms emerge. None of that means the parent's interpretation of that experience is accurate. No, the vaccines did not cause the autism, but try telling the parent that. They might tell you that they lived the experience so their interpretation is right.
And they're still wrong. Yes, the experiences they had are theirs and valid and valuable. That doesn't mean nobody else can have a more valid opinion about their experience--specifically, a more valid opinion about the causes of their child's autism.
This dynamic applies in many areas of our world: are soldiers' views of American foreign policy always more valid than non-soldiers" views? The soldiers lived the foreign policy experience, after all. Are a patient's views of their disease/diagnosis/disorder etc. always more valid than the views of medical professionals? The patient lives the experience, right?
In plenty of domains and applications one's lived experience should not be questioned by those who didn't live it. I'd say this should be the default in living our lives (hence my lack of concern about this meme even though I don't quite agree with it). However, the vague use of terms in messages like this might contribute to a belief, as Asimov said, that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (not Sagan; thanks, @courtcan) fueled by the insistence that one's interpretations of one's experiences are superior to all other interpretations.
-
I'm not posting this in agreement. Or not full agreement, anyway. It's been posted and shared on my feed in facebook. As a general principle: Absolutely. Your opinion about my experience is not as valid as my experience... usually.
The problem is that I'm a social scientist. That word "opinion" is carrying a lot of weight. If someone's ideas of what a non-lived experience is like are based on supposition, best guesses, and their own experience, then the graphic is valid: lived experience is much better.
However, if an "opinion" about my lived experience comes from the reported lived experiences from relatively representative thousand or so people, the opinion is probably more valid, for certain purposes/contexts.
"Validity" always has a context or target. No matter how much amazing research I have about a certain issue, my knowledge is never as good for an individual as that individual's lived experience. However, if "valid" means "generalizably true across lots of individuals," then one person's experience will never be as valid as a reasonable (lots of weight on that word) summation of many others' experiences. Another detail is whether one's interpretation of one's experiences (especially interpretation of causality) is necessarily more valid than interpretations by others who haven't lived the experience.
If you're feeling uncomfortable about this analysis, consider a parent whose child develops autism. The parent is fully convinced their kid's age 2 vaccinations were the cause. That parent has definitely had an experience, which included seeing their kid vaccinated, then seeing autism symptoms emerge. None of that means the parent's interpretation of that experience is accurate. No, the vaccines did not cause the autism, but try telling the parent that. They might tell you that they lived the experience so their interpretation is right.
And they're still wrong. Yes, the experiences they had are theirs and valid and valuable. That doesn't mean nobody else can have a more valid opinion about their experience--specifically, a more valid opinion about the causes of their child's autism.
This dynamic applies in many areas of our world: are soldiers' views of American foreign policy always more valid than non-soldiers" views? The soldiers lived the foreign policy experience, after all. Are a patient's views of their disease/diagnosis/disorder etc. always more valid than the views of medical professionals? The patient lives the experience, right?
In plenty of domains and applications one's lived experience should not be questioned by those who didn't live it. I'd say this should be the default in living our lives (hence my lack of concern about this meme even though I don't quite agree with it). However, the vague use of terms in messages like this might contribute to a belief, as Asimov said, that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (not Sagan; thanks, @courtcan) fueled by the insistence that one's interpretations of one's experiences are superior to all other interpretations.
-
I'm not posting this in agreement. Or not full agreement, anyway. It's been posted and shared on my feed in facebook. As a general principle: Absolutely. Your opinion about my experience is not as valid as my experience... usually.
The problem is that I'm a social scientist. That word "opinion" is carrying a lot of weight. If someone's ideas of what a non-lived experience is like are based on supposition, best guesses, and their own experience, then the graphic is valid: lived experience is much better.
However, if an "opinion" about my lived experience comes from the reported lived experiences from relatively representative thousand or so people, the opinion is probably more valid, for certain purposes/contexts.
"Validity" always has a context or target. No matter how much amazing research I have about a certain issue, my knowledge is never as good for an individual as that individual's lived experience. However, if "valid" means "generalizably true across lots of individuals," then one person's experience will never be as valid as a reasonable (lots of weight on that word) summation of many others' experiences. Another detail is whether one's interpretation of one's experiences (especially interpretation of causality) is necessarily more valid than interpretations by others who haven't lived the experience.
If you're feeling uncomfortable about this analysis, consider a parent whose child develops autism. The parent is fully convinced their kid's age 2 vaccinations were the cause. That parent has definitely had an experience, which included seeing their kid vaccinated, then seeing autism symptoms emerge. None of that means the parent's interpretation of that experience is accurate. No, the vaccines did not cause the autism, but try telling the parent that. They might tell you that they lived the experience so their interpretation is right.
And they're still wrong. Yes, the experiences they had are theirs and valid and valuable. That doesn't mean nobody else can have a more valid opinion about their experience--specifically, a more valid opinion about the causes of their child's autism.
This dynamic applies in many areas of our world: are soldiers' views of American foreign policy always more valid than non-soldiers" views? The soldiers lived the foreign policy experience, after all. Are a patient's views of their disease/diagnosis/disorder etc. always more valid than the views of medical professionals? The patient lives the experience, right?
In plenty of domains and applications one's lived experience should not be questioned by those who didn't live it. I'd say this should be the default in living our lives (hence my lack of concern about this meme even though I don't quite agree with it). However, the vague use of terms in messages like this might contribute to a belief, as Asimov said, that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (not Sagan; thanks, @courtcan) fueled by the insistence that one's interpretations of one's experiences are superior to all other interpretations.
-
I'm not posting this in agreement. Or not full agreement, anyway. It's been posted and shared on my feed in facebook. As a general principle: Absolutely. Your opinion about my experience is not as valid as my experience... usually.
The problem is that I'm a social scientist. That word "opinion" is carrying a lot of weight. If someone's ideas of what a non-lived experience is like are based on supposition, best guesses, and their own experience, then the graphic is valid: lived experience is much better.
However, if an "opinion" about my lived experience comes from the reported lived experiences from relatively representative thousand or so people, the opinion is probably more valid, for certain purposes/contexts.
"Validity" always has a context or target. No matter how much amazing research I have about a certain issue, my knowledge is never as good for an individual as that individual's lived experience. However, if "valid" means "generalizably true across lots of individuals," then one person's experience will never be as valid as a reasonable (lots of weight on that word) summation of many others' experiences. Another detail is whether one's interpretation of one's experiences (especially interpretation of causality) is necessarily more valid than interpretations by others who haven't lived the experience.
If you're feeling uncomfortable about this analysis, consider a parent whose child develops autism. The parent is fully convinced their kid's age 2 vaccinations were the cause. That parent has definitely had an experience, which included seeing their kid vaccinated, then seeing autism symptoms emerge. None of that means the parent's interpretation of that experience is accurate. No, the vaccines did not cause the autism, but try telling the parent that. They might tell you that they lived the experience so their interpretation is right.
And they're still wrong. Yes, the experiences they had are theirs and valid and valuable. That doesn't mean nobody else can have a more valid opinion about their experience--specifically, a more valid opinion about the causes of their child's autism.
This dynamic applies in many areas of our world: are soldiers' views of American foreign policy always more valid than non-soldiers" views? The soldiers lived the foreign policy experience, after all. Are a patient's views of their disease/diagnosis/disorder etc. always more valid than the views of medical professionals? The patient lives the experience, right?
In plenty of domains and applications one's lived experience should not be questioned by those who didn't live it. I'd say this should be the default in living our lives (hence my lack of concern about this meme even though I don't quite agree with it). However, the vague use of terms in messages like this might contribute to a belief, as Asimov said, that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (not Sagan; thanks, @courtcan) fueled by the insistence that one's interpretations of one's experiences are superior to all other interpretations.
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The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke
This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.
On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.
When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.
From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments. How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.
Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see.
Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.
1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304
2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.
#AgnesCallard #cognitiveBiases #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #decisionMaking #epistemology #evolutionaryPsychology #humanPsychology #identity #introspection #mentalModels #metacognition #mindset #navigation #neuroscience #normativeSelfBlindness #personalDevelopment #philosophy #sensemaking #socraticThinking #spaceAndPlace
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The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke
This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.
On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.
When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.
From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments. How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.
Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see.
Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.
1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304
2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.
#AgnesCallard #cognitiveBiases #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #decisionMaking #epistemology #evolutionaryPsychology #humanPsychology #identity #introspection #mentalModels #metacognition #mindset #navigation #neuroscience #normativeSelfBlindness #personalDevelopment #philosophy #sensemaking #socraticThinking #spaceAndPlace
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The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke
This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.
On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.
When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.
From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments. How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.
Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see.
Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.
1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304
2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.
#AgnesCallard #cognitiveBiases #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #decisionMaking #epistemology #evolutionaryPsychology #humanPsychology #identity #introspection #mentalModels #metacognition #mindset #navigation #neuroscience #normativeSelfBlindness #personalDevelopment #philosophy #sensemaking #socraticThinking #spaceAndPlace
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"The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/233-the-illusion-of-thinking-thoughts
#HackerNews #TheIllusionOfThinking #ThoughtsOnResearch #CriticalThinking #CognitiveBiases #HackerNews
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"The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/233-the-illusion-of-thinking-thoughts
#HackerNews #TheIllusionOfThinking #ThoughtsOnResearch #CriticalThinking #CognitiveBiases #HackerNews
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"The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/233-the-illusion-of-thinking-thoughts
#HackerNews #TheIllusionOfThinking #ThoughtsOnResearch #CriticalThinking #CognitiveBiases #HackerNews
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"The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/233-the-illusion-of-thinking-thoughts
#HackerNews #TheIllusionOfThinking #ThoughtsOnResearch #CriticalThinking #CognitiveBiases #HackerNews
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Listen, fellow progressives/liberals: it's hard to swallow (I know because it's me) but identifying as a member of the side of the culture war that identifies #authoritarianism, #conformity, #groupthink, #tribalism, etc. doesn't mean we're immune to those things. Not in the least.
It also doesn't mean you know what "cognitive dissonance" or "fragile masculinity" actually mean, but maybe those are separate issues. The main point is: Physican Cure Thyself is something we should almost all be told on a regular basis.
#UncomfortableTruth #GroupDynamics
#CognitiveBiases #liberal #progressive -
Listen, fellow progressives/liberals: it's hard to swallow (I know because it's me) but identifying as a member of the side of the culture war that identifies #authoritarianism, #conformity, #groupthink, #tribalism, etc. doesn't mean we're immune to those things. Not in the least.
It also doesn't mean you know what "cognitive dissonance" or "fragile masculinity" actually mean, but maybe those are separate issues. The main point is: Physican Cure Thyself is something we should almost all be told on a regular basis.
#UncomfortableTruth #GroupDynamics
#CognitiveBiases #liberal #progressive -
Listen, fellow progressives/liberals: it's hard to swallow (I know because it's me) but identifying as a member of the side of the culture war that identifies #authoritarianism, #conformity, #groupthink, #tribalism, etc. doesn't mean we're immune to those things. Not in the least.
It also doesn't mean you know what "cognitive dissonance" or "fragile masculinity" actually mean, but maybe those are separate issues. The main point is: Physican Cure Thyself is something we should almost all be told on a regular basis.
#UncomfortableTruth #GroupDynamics
#CognitiveBiases #liberal #progressive -
Listen, fellow progressives/liberals: it's hard to swallow (I know because it's me) but identifying as a member of the side of the culture war that identifies #authoritarianism, #conformity, #groupthink, #tribalism, etc. doesn't mean we're immune to those things. Not in the least.
It also doesn't mean you know what "cognitive dissonance" or "fragile masculinity" actually mean, but maybe those are separate issues. The main point is: Physican Cure Thyself is something we should almost all be told on a regular basis.
#UncomfortableTruth #GroupDynamics
#CognitiveBiases #liberal #progressive -
Depressive realism is the paradoxical finding that people experiencing active #depression are often more accurate in their judgments of the likelihood of success, good things happening, or the level of control they have over those things than people who are not depressed.
It's paradoxical because non-depressed people's illusions about control, predictability, and good things around the corner actually lead to more good things happening, on average, because those illusions are motivating. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy for many people (at least compared to people having a depressive episode) based on an inaccurate understanding of reality.
The USA seems to be investing heavily right now in widening the outcome divide between realistic pessimism and unrealistic optimism: The "grind culture" or "hustle lifestyle" shit blames anyone with motivational issues for their circumstances and praises anyone with good circumstances, no matter how much or little they had to do with those.
None of this is new. I just think we're dialing it up.
#work #jobs #toxicpositivity #motivation #mentalhealth #cognitivebiases #uspol
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Depressive realism is the paradoxical finding that people experiencing active #depression are often more accurate in their judgments of the likelihood of success, good things happening, or the level of control they have over those things than people who are not depressed.
It's paradoxical because non-depressed people's illusions about control, predictability, and good things around the corner actually lead to more good things happening, on average, because those illusions are motivating. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy for many people (at least compared to people having a depressive episode) based on an inaccurate understanding of reality.
The USA seems to be investing heavily right now in widening the outcome divide between realistic pessimism and unrealistic optimism: The "grind culture" or "hustle lifestyle" shit blames anyone with motivational issues for their circumstances and praises anyone with good circumstances, no matter how much or little they had to do with those.
None of this is new. I just think we're dialing it up.
#work #jobs #toxicpositivity #motivation #mentalhealth #cognitivebiases #uspol
-
Depressive realism is the paradoxical finding that people experiencing active #depression are often more accurate in their judgments of the likelihood of success, good things happening, or the level of control they have over those things than people who are not depressed.
It's paradoxical because non-depressed people's illusions about control, predictability, and good things around the corner actually lead to more good things happening, on average, because those illusions are motivating. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy for many people (at least compared to people having a depressive episode) based on an inaccurate understanding of reality.
The USA seems to be investing heavily right now in widening the outcome divide between realistic pessimism and unrealistic optimism: The "grind culture" or "hustle lifestyle" shit blames anyone with motivational issues for their circumstances and praises anyone with good circumstances, no matter how much or little they had to do with those.
None of this is new. I just think we're dialing it up.
#work #jobs #toxicpositivity #motivation #mentalhealth #cognitivebiases #uspol
-
Depressive realism is the paradoxical finding that people experiencing active #depression are often more accurate in their judgments of the likelihood of success, good things happening, or the level of control they have over those things than people who are not depressed.
It's paradoxical because non-depressed people's illusions about control, predictability, and good things around the corner actually lead to more good things happening, on average, because those illusions are motivating. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy for many people (at least compared to people having a depressive episode) based on an inaccurate understanding of reality.
The USA seems to be investing heavily right now in widening the outcome divide between realistic pessimism and unrealistic optimism: The "grind culture" or "hustle lifestyle" shit blames anyone with motivational issues for their circumstances and praises anyone with good circumstances, no matter how much or little they had to do with those.
None of this is new. I just think we're dialing it up.
#work #jobs #toxicpositivity #motivation #mentalhealth #cognitivebiases #uspol
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2/
A manipulation technique also known as "microtargeting": "a type of personalised communication that involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements" [3].
[3] on #microtargeting:
- "it exploits personal data [...]
- conceals its true nature [...]
- allows [...] to make incompatible promises to different segments of the electorate". Potentially targeting #CognitiveBiases by opaque/foreign #misinformation & #disinformation -
2/
A manipulation technique also known as "microtargeting": "a type of personalised communication that involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements" [3].
[3] on #microtargeting:
- "it exploits personal data [...]
- conceals its true nature [...]
- allows [...] to make incompatible promises to different segments of the electorate". Potentially targeting #CognitiveBiases by opaque/foreign #misinformation & #disinformation -
2/
A manipulation technique also known as "microtargeting": "a type of personalised communication that involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements" [3].
[3] on #microtargeting:
- "it exploits personal data [...]
- conceals its true nature [...]
- allows [...] to make incompatible promises to different segments of the electorate". Potentially targeting #CognitiveBiases by opaque/foreign #misinformation & #disinformation -
2/
A manipulation technique also known as "microtargeting": "a type of personalised communication that involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements" [3].
[3] on #microtargeting:
- "it exploits personal data [...]
- conceals its true nature [...]
- allows [...] to make incompatible promises to different segments of the electorate". Potentially targeting #CognitiveBiases by opaque/foreign #misinformation & #disinformation -
I'm still on #facebook * and I have a few acquaintances who post stuff that is both frustrating for the rational and post-religious parts of my brain and also reassuring, because apparently there would be plenty of clients if I need to fully sell out and become a psychic for cash.
- for friends and family updates and to post "WTF is wrong with you?" political memes until I get banned
-
I'm still on #facebook * and I have a few acquaintances who post stuff that is both frustrating for the rational and post-religious parts of my brain and also reassuring, because apparently there would be plenty of clients if I need to fully sell out and become a psychic for cash.
- for friends and family updates and to post "WTF is wrong with you?" political memes until I get banned
-
I'm still on #facebook * and I have a few acquaintances who post stuff that is both frustrating for the rational and post-religious parts of my brain and also reassuring, because apparently there would be plenty of clients if I need to fully sell out and become a psychic for cash.
- for friends and family updates and to post "WTF is wrong with you?" political memes until I get banned
-
I'm still on #facebook * and I have a few acquaintances who post stuff that is both frustrating for the rational and post-religious parts of my brain and also reassuring, because apparently there would be plenty of clients if I need to fully sell out and become a psychic for cash.
- for friends and family updates and to post "WTF is wrong with you?" political memes until I get banned
-
#CognitiveBiases in the #Bible (with Dr. Bart Ehrman)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYfxczHZfgI&list=WL
"The authors of the #NewTestament experienced #cognitivebias like anyone else, and sometimes that shows in the text. Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to discuss how #attributionbias, #fundamentalattributionerror, and #confirmationbias influenced the writings of the #apostlePaul, the Pastoral #epistles, the New Testament canon, and #biblical interpretation."
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#CognitiveBiases in the #Bible (with Dr. Bart Ehrman)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYfxczHZfgI&list=WL
"The authors of the #NewTestament experienced #cognitivebias like anyone else, and sometimes that shows in the text. Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to discuss how #attributionbias, #fundamentalattributionerror, and #confirmationbias influenced the writings of the #apostlePaul, the Pastoral #epistles, the New Testament canon, and #biblical interpretation."
