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Heuristics and Bias
Heuristics and Bias
Dr Carl Thompson
Before we start
A quick exercise
How (bias)
primacy and recency ignoring base rates overconfidence Framing etcetc Representativeness Availablity Anchoring and adjustment
why (heuristics)
Limited number of principles that individuals use to make sense of complexity Generally useful but lead to severe and systematic errors Subjective probability estimates similar to physical quantities (size or distance) Clarity! Kahneman and Tversky
Representativeness
P obj A belongs to class B (Dx)? P event A originates from process B (causality) P process B will generate event A (treatment) People rely on representativeness or the degree to which A resembles B.
Representativeness (2)
Insensitivity to prior probabilities of outcomes Insensitivity to sample size and law of small numbers
H-T-H-T-T-H
H-H-H-T-T-T H-H-H-H-T-H
Flight training+
Dont be misled by highly detailed scenarios Whenever possible, pay attention to base rates Remember that chance is not self correcting Dont misinterpret regression towards the mean
availability
P (event) recalled by the ease with which instances can be brought to mind.
Good news - availability is useful because instances of large classes are usually reached better and faster than instances of less frequent classes Bad news availability is affected by factors other than frequency and P.
availability
Plane crashes vs car crashes filling in the gaps Think of a number between 1 and 20
Biases due to retrievability of instances biases of imagine ability Overconfidence makes biases from availability worse
Paths
10 questions
Yes
No
16
34
43
44
Maintain accurate records and use them Beware of wishful thinking Break compound events into simple events
Estimate the product 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 ??? How thick is a piece of paper if folded in on itself 100 times? Clinical anchors?
Initial estimate of pre-test likelihood of disease (including prevalence). Cognitively cautious (hammond 1967)
conclusions
Judgement and decision research is conducted by human beings who are prone to many of the same biases and errors as their experimental subjects. (Plous 1993)
Heuristics exist for a reason and simply being aware of them can be enough Biases CAN be overcome (ish)