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Overcoming Bias : How Wrong Can We Be?
This all seems to add up to a consistent expert consensus that humans quite often, perhaps even usually, just don’t know why they do what they do. And this is extremely disturbing, as it calls into question our own opinions about why we do what we do.
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Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give.
Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing. The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product. Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are often quite at odds with the reasons people give for why they like or respect others.
Contemplating Singularity | Forum
Summarizes and discusses N. Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark (on extended mind) and Terence Deacon and Merlin Donald on evolution of symbolic communication.
Oxford University Press: Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior: Sara J. Shettleworth
Cognition, Evolution and the Study of Behavior integrates research from psychology, behavioral ecology, and ethology in a wide-ranging synthesis of theory and research about animal cognition in the broadest sense, from species-specific adaptations in fish to cognitive mapping in rats and honeybees to theories of mind for chimpanzees. As a major contribution to the emerging discipline of comparative cognition, the book is an invaluable resource for all students and researchers in psychology, zoology, behavioral neuroscience.
Relevant History: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination
so now it's time for the next project: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong.
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Be certain, not right. People love certainty. They crave it. In experiments, psychologists have shown that "[w]e tend to seek advice from experts who exhibit the most confidence – even when we know they haven’t been particularly accurate in the past." We just can't resist certainty.
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Claim to be an expert: it makes people's brains hurt. In a remarkable new study, Jan Engelmann and colleagues used fMRI to observe the brains of people who received expert advice during a financial simulation. They found that subjects thought differently about their decisions when they received the advice-- even if it was bad advice-- than when they worked on their own. As the researchers put it, "one effect of expert advice is to 'offload' the calculation of value of decision options from the individual’s brain."
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SSRN-Preferences for Psychological Enhancements: The Reluctance to Enhance Fundamental Traits by Jason Riis, Joseph Simmons, Geoffrey Goodwin
Four studies examined young healthy individuals' willingness to take drugs intended to enhance various social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be highly fundamental to the self (e.g., social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental (e.g., concentration ability). Moral acceptability of a trait enhancement strongly predicted people's desire to legalize those enhancements, but not their willingness to take those enhancements. Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased people's interest in a fundamental enhancement, and eliminated the preference for non-fundamental over fundamental enhancements.
[cond-mat/0403299] Discrete Hierarchical Organization of Social Group Sizes
The "social brain hypothesis" for the evolution of large brains in primates has led to evidence for the coevolution of neocortical size and social group sizes. Extrapolation of these findings to modern humans indicated that the equivalent group size for our species should be approximately 150 (essentially the number of people known personally as individuals). Here, we combine data on human grouping in a comprehensive and systematic study. Using fractal analysis, we identify with high statistical confidence a discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to 3: rather than a single or a continuous spectrum of group sizes, humans spontaneously form groups of preferred sizes organized in a geometrical series approximating 3, 9, 27,... Such discrete scale invariance (DSI) could be related to that identified in signatures of herding behavior in financial markets and might reflect a hierarchical processing of social nearness by human brains.
Less Wrong: What's In A Name?
The name letter effect is your subconscious preference for things that sound like your own name. This might be expected to mostly apply to small choices like product brand names, but it's been observed in choices of spouse, city of residence, and even career.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Doubts about democracy
There’s a conflict between liberty and democracy.
The problem here, though, is that the public’s preferences might be systematically irrational; contrary to the optimism of wisdom of crowds thinking, their errors might not cancel out.
Title: Introspection as a Source of Public Evidence
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First-person data have been both
condemned and hailed because of their alleged privacy. Critics argue that science must be based on
public evidence: since first-person data
are private, they should be banned from science. Apologists reply that first-person data are
necessary for understanding the mind:
since first-person data are private, scientists must be allowed to use
private evidence. I argue that both
views rest on a false premise. In
psychology and neuroscience, the subjects issuing first-person reports and
other first-person data play the epistemic role of a (self-) measuring instrument. Data from measuring instruments are public
and can be validated by public methods.
Therefore, first-person data are as public as any other scientific data: their use in science is legitimate, in
accordance with standard scientific methodology.
OnFiction: Folk Psychology and Narrative
Daniel Hutto has written Folk psychological narratives (2008) to argue against the idea that we each use a theory-of-mind to understand other people.
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There are two going theories of theory-of-mind. One, called the theory theory, is that each of us develops a theory of other people whom we know, and when we want to understand what some particular person is thinking and feeling, we crank the handle of this theory to make inferences. The other, which the members of this research group tend to prefer, is the simulation theory: that we create a simulation of the other person based on imagining ourselves to be in the situation that the other is in.
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of interest for the psychology of fiction for two reasons. One derives from the idea proposed by Lisa Zunshine (2006; click here for microreview) that what we are doing when we read fiction is to apply our theory-of-mind processes. We enjoy fiction because we are good at these processes. The other reason is that Hutto argues that understanding others, which previously has been treated as requiring a theory of mind in the form of theory theory or simulation, really needs no such thing. Rather, what is involved is an understanding of folk psychology, about why people do things. Both everyday explanations of action, and the explanations that occur in fiction, are expressed as what Hutto calls "folk psychological narratives." The defining feature of such narratives, he says, is that in them people act for reasons.
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