As I think has been mentioned in this thread by others, but bears repeating, if you want to convince people that they are affected by cognitive biases sometimes you have to really hit them over the head with them.
I’ve found the examples in Hindsight Devalues Science and the basketball video (I don’t imagine there are many people here who haven’t seen it, but I’ll not post a spoiler just in case). Are particularly effective at this. I guess calibration tests would also be good on this metric. Once you’ve pointed out a “cortical illusion” like this, most people are genuinely interested as to how it works.
On the other hand, I’ve found that explaining about results where you have to say “studies show that people tend to biased in direction y” is much harder than explaining about results in which you can say “remember that experiment we just did, where you were biased in direction y?”.
Eg, it’s nearly impossible to convince someone that they would anchor their guess of how many African countries are in the UN to the last two digits of their phone number. Even if you tell them that everyone does it, they’ll assume they’re an exception.
Any more examples of biases that you can “hit people over the head with” in this manner?
People who are spending $2000 probably value their time more highly than people who are spending $10-20, ceteris paribus. It might be less expensive for the second buyer to cross the street. (Even if it’s the same person on a different day or in a different frame of mind.)
That’s exactly what doesn’t make sense; asking the same people whether they’d walk across the street to save money on X should depend on how much they value their time, not on how much they value X. It isn’t rational for there to be states of mind where buying more expensive things makes people value their time more when the rest of the environment is identical.
As I think has been mentioned in this thread by others, but bears repeating, if you want to convince people that they are affected by cognitive biases sometimes you have to really hit them over the head with them.
I’ve found the examples in Hindsight Devalues Science and the basketball video (I don’t imagine there are many people here who haven’t seen it, but I’ll not post a spoiler just in case). Are particularly effective at this. I guess calibration tests would also be good on this metric. Once you’ve pointed out a “cortical illusion” like this, most people are genuinely interested as to how it works.
On the other hand, I’ve found that explaining about results where you have to say “studies show that people tend to biased in direction y” is much harder than explaining about results in which you can say “remember that experiment we just did, where you were biased in direction y?”.
Eg, it’s nearly impossible to convince someone that they would anchor their guess of how many African countries are in the UN to the last two digits of their phone number. Even if you tell them that everyone does it, they’ll assume they’re an exception.
Any more examples of biases that you can “hit people over the head with” in this manner?
People will often admit that they’ll walk across the road to save $10 on the cost of a $20 memory card but not a $2000 plasma TV.
People who are spending $2000 probably value their time more highly than people who are spending $10-20, ceteris paribus. It might be less expensive for the second buyer to cross the street. (Even if it’s the same person on a different day or in a different frame of mind.)
That’s exactly what doesn’t make sense; asking the same people whether they’d walk across the street to save money on X should depend on how much they value their time, not on how much they value X. It isn’t rational for there to be states of mind where buying more expensive things makes people value their time more when the rest of the environment is identical.