For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. and the Need for Cognition Scale, which measures “the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking.” As a result, they interspersed their tests of bias with various cognitive measurements, including the S.A.T.
Rather, they wanted to understand how these biases correlated with human intelligence. Given an anchor of a thousand feet, their estimates increased seven-fold.īut West and colleagues weren’t simply interested in reconfirming the known biases of the human mind.
Students exposed to a small “anchor”-like eighty-five feet-guessed, on average, that the tallest tree in the world was only a hundred and eighteen feet. Then the students were asked to estimate the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world. Subjects were first asked if the tallest redwood tree in the world was more than X feet, with X ranging from eighty-five to a thousand feet. West also gave a puzzle that measured subjects’ vulnerability to something called “anchoring bias,” which Kahneman and Tversky had demonstrated in the nineteen-seventies. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents-reason was our Promethean gift-Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers.
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