the wisdom of not thinking too much

This will be last blog post for Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking. Instead of introducing another cognitive bias or logical fallacy, this final post will be devoted to considering when wisdom requires that we stop thinking altogether or that we stop gathering data to reflect on.

change blindness

Change blindness is the failure to detect non-trivial changes in the visual field. The failure to see things changing right before your eyes may seem like a design fault, but it is actually a sign of evolutionary efficiency.

Examples may be seen by clicking  here, here, here, here, and here.

The term 'change blindness' was introduced by Ronald Rensink in 1997, although research in this area had been going on for many years. Experiments have shown that dramatic changes in the visual field often go unnoticed whether they are brought in gradually, flickered in and out, or abruptly brought in and out at various time intervals. The implication seems to be that the brain requires few details for our visual representations; the brain doesn't store dozens of details to which it can compare changes (Simons and Levin: 1998). The brain is not a video recorder and it is not constantly processing all the sense data available to it but is inattentive to much of that data, at least on a conscious level.

bias blind spot

The bias blind spot was described by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues (2002) as the tendency to perceive cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in oneself. The bias blind spot is a metabias since it refers to a pattern of inaccurate judgment in reasoning about cognitive biases.

suppressed evidence

A cogent argument presents all the relevant evidence. An argument that omits relevant evidence appears stronger and more cogent than it is.

The fallacy of suppressed evidence occurs when an arguer intentionally omits relevant data. This is a difficult fallacy to detect because we often have no way of knowing that we haven't been told the whole truth.

Many advertisements commit this fallacy. Ads inform us of a product's dangers only if required to do so by law. Ads never state that a competitor's product is equally good. The coal ^[*^], asbestos ^[*^], nuclear ^[*^], and tobacco ^[*^] industries have knowingly suppressed evidence regarding the health of their employees or the health hazards of their industries and products.

anecdotal evidence (testimonials)

Testimonials and anecdotes are used to support claims in many fields. Advertisers often rely on testimonials to persuade consumers of the effectiveness or value of their products or services. Others use anecdotes to drive home the horror of some alleged activity or the danger of widely-used electronic devices like cell phones. In the mid-90s, there were many people, some in law enforcement, claiming that Satanists were abducting and abusing children on a massive scale. The anecdotes involved vivid descriptions of horrible sexual abuse, even murder of innocent children. The anecdotes were quite convincing, especially when they were repeated on nationally televised programs with popular hosts like Geraldo Rivera. A four-year study in the early 1990s found the allegations of satanic ritual abuse to be without merit. Researchers investigated more than 12,000 accusations and surveyed more than 11,000 psychiatric, social service, and law enforcement personnel. The researchers could find no unequivocal evidence for a single case of satanic cult ritual abuse.

attribution biases

Human behavior can be understood as issuing from "internal" factors or personal characteristics--such as motives, intentions, or personality traits--and from "external" factors--such as the physical or social environment and other factors deemed out of one's personal control. Self-serving creatures that we are, we tend to attribute our own successes to our intelligence, knowledge, skill, perseverance, and other positive personal traits. Our failures are blamed on bad luck, sabotage by others, a lost lucky charm, and other such things. These attribution biases are referred to as the dispositional attribution bias and the situational attribution bias. They are applied in reverse when we try to explain the actions of others. Others succeed because they're lucky or have connections and they fail because they're stupid, wicked, or lazy.

control group study

A control group study uses a control group to compare to an experimental group in a test of a causal hypothesis. The control and experimental groups must be identical in all relevant ways except for the introduction of a suspected causal agent into the experimental group. If the suspected causal agent is actually a causal factor of some event, then logic dictates that that event should manifest itself more significantly in the experimental than in the control group. For example, if 'C' causes 'E', when we introduce 'C' into the experimental group but not into the control group, we should find 'E' occurring in the experimental group at a significantly greater rate than in the control group. Significance is measured by relation to chance: if an event is not likely due to chance, then its occurrence is statistically significant. Being statistically significant is not the same as being important. It means, again, that the results are not likely due to chance. That’s all it means.

A double-blind test is a control group test where neither the evaluator nor the subject knows which items are controls. A randomized test is one that randomly assigns items to the control and the experimental groups. Whenever possible, a control group study should randomly assign members to the control and experimental groups. This reduces the chance of biasing the study.

The purpose of controls, double-blind, and randomized testing is to reduce error, self-deception, and bias. An example should clarify the necessity of these safeguards.