Search results for: “cognitive bias”
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Using Cognitive Bias: Politics and Policy
You may have noticed that I’ve recently been fascinated by everything cognitive bias. With the release of Nudge—a book looking at how politicians around the world are using cognitive bias—the general public are now going to be hearing about it a lot more too. The Times has a nice case-study where the theories are used…
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On Bias, Rhetoric, and Cognitive Dissonance
Author of The New York Times’ Consumed column, Rob Walker, dissects a Weekly Standard article discussing the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain to answer the question: what’s the difference between rhetoric and cognitive dissonance? Both can result in points of view that are so biased that they have no connection to reality. But…
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Testing Rationality and Bias
How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such…
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Derren Brown’s Bertram Effect Experiment Text
I love the Bertram effect. It’s likely the cognitive bias / psychological experiment that I think of the most. While the text from the original experiment is good, it’s from 1948. In the brilliant Tricks of the Mind and his 2000s TV show of the same name, Derren Brown updated the experiment, using his own text (reproduced…
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Year One in Review
366 days, 616 posts and 15,144 spam comments later, I am happy and proud to announce that Lone Gunman is now one year old (founded on February 29th 2008, I suppose it’s not even that, is it?). LG has evolved into something completely different to what I had first envisaged and the whole experience of…
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Action Through Advertising
Taking a leaf out of the advertisers’ book may be the key to succeeding in the fight against global warming and ecological apathy. At least, that’s the view Robert Butler takes after looking at the successes of a novel advertising campaign used to cut the incidence of littering in Texas: The ads avoided the negatives…
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CIA Guide to Optimised Thinking
Complex situations are – by their very nature – difficult to understand. Compound this with the fact that in any given situation we’re all going to have cognitive biases that make us view situations differently and inaccurately, and you’re going to have a bit of a mess when it comes to thinking about and analysing…