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The Science of Irrational Decisions
The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
I think Im 50 / 50 on this one
Will it help me to understand why I read Slashdot instead of doing something productive with my time?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
define "big words". do you mean closer to "potato" or closer to "superstructure"
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
How the hell did this article make it off the firehose?
There is a quote in the summary from a blog referenced. The blog is not linked to -- instead the only link is to a site (Amazon, I think) selling the book.
Where's the actual discussion of what's in the book? Where's the article (or blog entry)?
If you're going to post a book review... please, include the review. Otherwise it looks like you're just hocking a book.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
http://www.ratracetrap.com/the-rat-race-trap/irrational-decisions-anchoring-and-arbitrary-coherence.html
Editors sleeping on the job
What a sweet job
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
People tend to forget that logic is just a set of rules. If you load it up with bad data, especially data that is driven by pure emotions, you'll rationalize yourself into neat, coherent clusterfuck. The difference between wisdom and intelligence is that the former is an a priori mental filter for bad data, the latter is just raw capacity. That's why a wise person need not follow a life based on reason alone to generally make good decisions.
Seriously..
It looks like the blog is here: http://www.ratracetrap.com/the-rat-race-trap/irrational-decisions-anchoring-and-arbitrary-coherence.html
This is exactly why I never buy anything that is not previously labeled with a price. I will negotiate but not if I have to contemplate a starting value myself.
Nothing really new here. Decisions making based on anchors is a large part of why we use Planning Poker when doing our estimations. All it takes is that one guy that says everything is easy to influence everyone's brain to under-estimate a project.
TFS never claimed it was a strong correlation. It's a highly SIGNIFICANT correlation (meaning that the probability that the result occurred by chance and not systematically is very low, less than 5%).
Now, whether or not .33 is a STRONG correlation is another matter. By most definitions, it is not, although .52 would be a moderate correlation. However, the correlation does suggest that about 10-30% (r-squared) or more of the variation in subjects' decisions was accounted for by their social security numbers (accounted for != caused by, but we can make inferences based on the experimental design). Over a lifetime, 10% variation due to random irrelevant factors (like SS number) is serious, and 30% is HUGE. In that sense, it is a meaningful result, even if the correlation is not a "strong" one in terms of proportion.
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
Our brains favor consistency over correctness... we're finally coming close to understanding the biological origins of conservativism. Here's hoping this research eventually leads to a cure.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Apparently I'm in a very pedantic mood today.
Correlation is a measure of how well the model describes the data. So according to the summary, 33 to 52% of the variation in the data was explained by the model. Depending on the inherent variability in the criteria being evaluated, that could be very good or very bad. In my line of work that would be very bad, but for social sciences such as sociology, that is very high. It all comes down to how many variables you can control. The more control, the less variation, the higher the correlation when the model is a good fit.
Significance is a measure of the probability that the response seen is due to random variation or errors in sampling. They may have given a measure of significance in the article, but the summary did not.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Think about home sales right now, not long ago homes in my area were selling for about $1,000,000. However the price has decreased to around $800,000 to $700,000 and they are still dropping (Yeah the joy of CA). However homes are being pulled off the market and sitting, vacant, not even being rented. Why? Because they have already decided that they need to get more than the current sale price. Logically, they know it is imposable, and that bubble prices won't be back soon enough to make holding on to the real-estate and paying maintenance profitable. Still they are anchored to one million dollars. (PS My area is mostly people who purchased back in the 60's and 70's and have lived in there homes seance then. Mostly homes for sale are inheritance, or some one who is down sizing because the kids moved away. We don't have many people who bought in the bubble and can't afford to sell because sale price is lower than the mortgage)
We are the Borg...
So, it is basically about cognitive dissonance?
Science basically involved checking whether what "everyone knows" is actually correct, and then trying to find out why.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Wow. I knew the "hurr durr, what good is this study, it's only repeating common sense, what a waste of time/resources" response was coming as soon as I read the summary title, but I didn't expect it would be the first post. Especially since this story is specifically ABOUT the way that people are prone to believe "obvious" things in spite of actual evidence.
Please, get this through your heads: "common sense" (another name for biases gained from anecdotes and cultural groupthink) is often misleading, unreliable, over-broad, or outright wrong. At one time it was "common sense" that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. It was "common sense" that large, heavy objects can't float in water. It was "common sense" that the world is flat and women and blacks are intellectually inferior to white men and that the planets and moons are perfect spheres orbiting in perfect circles.
Science is about testing claims through empirical experiment--sometimes the results match up with "common sense", sometimes they don't. Sure, this story an example of a place where experiment confirmed something that is fairly obvious on its face--but the data goes a long way towards better understanding the WHYS and HOWS of this "obvious" phenomenon. Data is never a bad thing.
In other words, a company that installs Windows on its first PC will probably install it on thousands of additions, instead of installing Linux on hundreds.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
To me laziness and pride are the two biggest obstacles to rational thinking.
Laziness since, more often than not, simply sitting down and thinking things through you can avoid most irrational decisions. Time constraints can make this difficult. But I'm surprised at how often I see family/friends make poor decisions simply because they don't know how to stop and think. I like this quote from Samuel Johnson since it articulates the fact that easy access to information does not mean people will spend the energy to even look at it (let alone use it wisely):
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Next to laziness, is pride. This boils down to the fact that culturally we're often taught to focus on being right rather than focusing on what's right. This comes from the illusion that one can own or control truth. I've seen this affect friendships, marriages, professional atmospheres, politics, etc. Truth is independent. You either align yourself with it or continue to live in ignorance. Of course, objective indisputable truth is rare or even non-existent in humanity, but it's the honest, humble desire to align oneself with truth (not the other way around) that's important here.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
The wife's number ends in 99, which explains everything.
threadeds blog
For better understanding on Dan Ariely's point, see this video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
Calling a sociologist a scientist analogous to calling a chiropractor a doctor.
Are you saying that there is no scientific merit to studying systems of people people and societies? Or are you saying that sociologists don't know how to apply the scientific method in their studies?
If it's the former, that seems to me an ignorant position to take. Social systems may be messier and less predictable than other physical systems, but that just means the job of trying to derive laws of social science is harder than in the "hard" sciences. If it's the latter, why don't you apply some scientific method and publish some ground-breaking paper that will show those sociologists how it's done and win yourself the Nobel prize?
"something he calls "arbitrary coherence."
And that other call things like behavioral persistance, behavioral momentum, priming, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, etc. He can call it whatever he wants, but that's not going to make the concept his.
"Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
Those are correlations, the magnitude and direction of co-variance of two measures. These are positive so they vary the same directions. Correlations, are often done using Pearson's technique and are then given the variable little r. A handy but of work with r is the ability to tell at a glance just how much of the observed variance can be explained by the scores. To do so, simply square them. So the amount of variance explained in these tests are 0.11 to 0.27 (11% to 27%). That means from 73% to 89% of the observed variance is unexplained. In practical terms, that's poor. I know in psychology we tend to accept such low r's as meaningful, but we're about the only ones.
As to "significance": there is no such thing as "highly" (or any other modifier) significant. The significance score, using the variable little p, is what it is, whether you have a program tell you it's equal to or less than a number calculated from the data, or you calculate it and find it to be less than some arbitrary cut off value. If p 0.001 or if p = 0.9, that is the significance level. You can't use the modifiers because significance depends on things like the number of subjects and/or samples, score variance, multiple comparisons between scores, etc. The significance changes. Even with the same data set, if you calculate a second result, you're doing a second comparison which requires a correction factor and that changes p. What significance means in one data set (how many times Mary punches the Bobo doll after watching Homer choke Bart) has nothing to do with another (how many meters depth on average the Earth's surface would be sterilized by all US vs. all Russian thermonuclear weapons), so some dangling, arbitrary "much much MUCH so" means even less, being of zero import but incorrectly suggesting there is.
So those (.33 to .52) are the r values, In calculating them p was also. It should have been reported. I have no idea of the author ever did or not because the references here consist of two blog posts about the guy's work and one about a book on this subject, and zero that I see on peer reviewed journal articles. Now, I'll be the first to tell you that last bit doesn't count for near what people think, but at least they see to it the formulae are followed, one being proper (as in APA format) quoting of statistics. I might have looked up an article to see if the author gets it right, but I'm not about to read a book by someone who either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that the concept he's examining has already been, in much greater depth and clarity than what's given here.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I was with you all the way up until you wrote "laws of social science". Asimov rest in peace, but no.
it's in my head
Waiting for prices to climb is a lousy reason not to sell right now. There is no guarantee that the values will indeed rise. What needs to happen is for banks to start selling the houses at whatever value causes them to be sold. PERIOD.
We'll never know the value of the houses if they are not sold, and therefore cannot fully understand the depths of how sunk the economy really is. Banks holding onto houses in foreclosure are NOT good for the economy.
IMHO any Bank that took Federal $ should be required to liquidate holdings at auction. Let's just say the limit to hold a house is 365 days, before forced public auction. If they can get the house sold, great. If not, it goes to auction.
Once houses start getting sold again, and the inventory of houses on the market start to reach nominal levels, then we'll know the TRUE value of houses.
And it would free up a great deal of equity currently being held hostage.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Just want to point out that even though the correlation coefficients are definitely significant, that isn't effect size. Squaring the coefficients will give you a better idea of the size of the effect we're talking about here. In this case, the effect was found to account for about 11% to 27% of the shared variance. This is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it also doesn't mean that you can really bet on it.
I'm not one of these "social science isn't science" trolltards. I just like to remind people to think in effect sizes to temper their enthusiasm. This is interesting stuff, no matter what, but having a couple quick 'n' dirty formulae for calculating effect size in your mental pocket will keep your reality check intact.