My Bias is Special

Here's a roundup of links I mentioned in class recently.
New Yorker article on fundamental attribution error

Excellent explanation of hindsight bias

And here's the picture I tried to draw in class to explain the contrast effect bias. The green circles are the same size:

There was another link I was supposed to post, but I forget what it is. Anyone remember what it was about?

Impeding Us Since Birth

Here is a pair of links to articles on psychological impediments that I mentioned in class last week:

Why stereotyping is illogical
(Malcolm Gladwell)

The psychological impediment driving The Secret
(wishful thinking run amok)

Also, wikipedia's full list of cognitive biases is available here.

I'm the Special-est

Now that we're discussing psychological impediments, I can bring up one of my favorite topics: I'M-SPECIAL-ism. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that most Americans overestimate their own abilities. This is one of the biggest hurdles to proper reasoning: the natural tendency to think that we're smarter--or more powerful, or prettier, or whatever--than we really are.

One of my favorite blogs is Overcoming Bias. Their mission statement is sublimely anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ist:

"How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."

This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me. That guy. You again.

So in the upcoming weeks, at least, I hope you'll join me in my campaign to end I'M-SPECIAL-ism.