01:830:101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Hindsight Bias, Psychological Science, Scale-Invariant Feature Transform
6 Jun 2018
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Module 2 Outline: The Need for Psychological Science
The Need for Psychological Science
▪ Humans cannot rely solely on intuition and common sense.
▪ Three phenomena illustrate this:
▪ Hindsight bias
▪ Judgmental overconfidence
▪ Tendency to perceive patterns in random events
Hindsight bias
▪ Tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we could have predicted it
▪ Also known as the “I-knew-it-all-along” phenomenon
The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense
▪ Overconfidence
▪ People tend to think they know more than they do.
▪ This occurs in academic and social behavior.
Perceiving order in random events
▪ People perceive patterns to make sense of their world.
▪ Even in random, unrelated data people often find order, because random sequences
often do not look random.
▪ People trust their intuition more than they should because intuitive thinking is flawed.
The Need for Psychological Science
▪ Why is intuition overused and errors made?
▪ Hindsight bias, overconfidence, and our tendency to perceive patterns in random
events often lead us to overestimate our intuition.
▪ Some happenings seem so extraordinary –such as winning the lottery twice—we
reject chance-related explanations
▪ However, with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen
▪ An event that happens to but 1 in 1 billion people every day occurs about
7 times a day, 2500 times a year.
▪ But scientific inquiry can help us sift reality from illusion.
Intuition an effortless,
immediate, automatic
feeling or thought compared
to specific, conscious
reasoning
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Document Summary
Module 2 outline: the need for psychological science. The need for psychological science: humans cannot rely solely on intuition and common sense, three phenomena illustrate this, hindsight bias, judgmental overconfidence, tendency to perceive patterns in random events. Intuition an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought compared to specific, conscious reasoning: tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we could have predicted it, also known as the i-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. The limits of intuition and common sense: overconfidence, people tend to think they know more than they do, this occurs in academic and social behavior. An event that happens to but 1 in 1 billion people every day occurs about. 7 times a day, 2500 times a year: but scientific inquiry can help us sift reality from illusion. That is what the scientific attitude is all about: thinking critically, critical thinking refers to a more careful style of forming and evaluating knowledge than simply using intuition.
