Six Thinking Mistakes

Kida's Six Basic Thinking Mistakes:

1. Prefer stories to statistics.
2. Seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.
3. Rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.
4. Sometimes misperceive the world around us.
5. Tend to oversimplify our thinking.
6. Have faulty memories.
   

"Don't Believe Everything You Think" Chapters

1. Weird Beliefs and Pseudoscientific Thinking
2. A Gremlin on My Shoulder
3. Thinking Like a Scientist
4. The Role of Chance and Coincidence
5. Seeing Things That Aren't There
6. Seeing Associations That Aren't There
7. Predicting the Unpredictable
8. Seeking to Confirm
9. How We Simplify
10. Framing and Other Decision Snags
11. Faulty Memories
12. The Influence of Others
    

Seeking Disconfirming Evidence

I need to do this more and this was an eye-opener for me!

Kida's main point was:

"Whatever your belief, find disconfirming evidence, and take that into consideration, because we really on confirming evidence far too much because it is easier for our brains to process"

I've had this belief that gay people for whatever reason end up institutionalized in state hospitals because they cannot manage to make it in this world. My confirming evidences are various people I know that have gone into these places for long term periods. However, perhaps there are successful case as well that don't come to mind because of my bias. David Geffen is a successful example. Am I focusing too much on the outliers?

Pages 164-5 in Chapter 8 "Seeking to Confirm" is where Kida deals with these issues most "Don't Believe Everything You Think."

Reliability of Evidence from Others

Here are some thoughts and questions I have about Kida's last three paragraphs in his "Reliability of Evidence Received from Others" section in Chapter 12 "The Influence of Others"

It's increasingly difficult to make appropriate decisions when we're exposed to a barrage of faulty information. The risk of AIDS for heterosexuals in the United States is a good example. What's your risk of contracting AIDS if you are a non-IV-drug-using heterosexual? In the 1980s we were told by the media: "Research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That's by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease"; "By 1991 one in ten babies may be AIDS victims"; and "The AIDS epidemic is the greatest threat to society, as we know it, ever faced by civilization--more serious than the plagues of past centuries." If we believed these sensational accounts we'd stop having sex altogether (pp 225-6).

Here is Kida's note explaining the media 1980s media quotations:

The quotes are by Oprah Winfrey, USA Today, and a member of the president's AIDS commission, respectively, in M. Fumento, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 3, 249, 324. Also see Gilovic, How We Know What Isn't So, p. 107.

I definitely want to check these sources out, but isn't it a bit strange Kida's using a secondary source when one could use the Fumento notes to track down the original article from Oprah and USA Today? It's possible Fumento might have imperfect thinking also.

Moving onto Kida's next paragraph:

What happened? News sources played up the accounts of heterosexual transmission, emphasizing that it's a heterosexual disease in Africa and Haiti. They typically failed to note that most heterosexual transmissions involve one partner from a high-risk troup (e.g., gay, bisexual, intravenous drug user, hemophiliacs), and that public health practices in Africa and Haiti are so different from in the United States that they don't tell us much about the risk in the United States. But sensational stories get the ratings (p 226).

I've always wondered how so many girls could get HIV from "straight" guys. If it's statistically more dangerous to be the receptive partner, then how could so many straight guys be passing on the virus if they're only penetrating? Are that many of them sharing needles? I've always suspected more of these guys might be getting penetrated themselves than the governments, studies, and media let on. So my interest was really piqued when I zoned in on Kida's claim "they typically failed to note that most heterosexual transmissions involve one partner from a high-risk troup (e.g., gay, bisexual, intravenous drug user, hemophiliacs) . . ." However, what study or statistics are being used for this claim??? Kida has no note for this line!

Ok, here is the final paragraph of "The reliability of evidence received from others" section in "The Influence of Others" chapter:
So how can we know whether to trust someone's information? Here are some hints. Consider the source. With the AIDS issue, we have to look for the views of epidemiologists who try to understand and predict the spread of infectious diseases--not the views of sex therapists, actors, or talk show hosts. And, keep in mind that reporters can distort the views of the experts. Place more emphasis on past statistics instead of future projections. Even the experts have a hard time predicting future events, as we've seen. Be wary of anecdotal information. News magazines are notorious for reporting the problems of a single person, and since we are storytellers, we pay particular attention to that information. But as noted, personal accounts just don't provide good evidence to base our beliefs upon (p 226).

Again, this seems imprecise. Kida went on at length earlier in the book to explain how predictions are so often wrong, and frequently not much better than chance probability, or even worse, so why does he say we should look toward epidemiologists--what if it is an epidemiologist that falls into the same thinking errors Kida warns against? Admittedly, he also warns against predicting future events in the same paragraph. Plus, there are still stones unturned:

• For the guys who are spreading it to the girls, how can we learn how they got the virus first? Penetrating an infected girl, penetrating an infected guy (well, that doesn't sound very straight to me . . .), sharing needles, getting a blood transfusion, or getting penetrated by an infected guy (well, that's really not straight). What are the statistcs?
  
• If being bisexual or gay is high-risk, what is the statistical risk for being bisexual or gay if they use condoms every time they penetrate or get penetrated? How many people use these condoms all the time?
• If the medical care is so different in these countries, as Kida claims, then how many hemophiliacs or other people needing blood are actually fortunately enough to get a blood transfusion in the first place?
  

Overconfidence in the "Framing and Other Decision Snags" chapter

I'm wrestling with this paragraph, but can't figure out what's bothering me about it.

One reason we're overconfident is we remember the hits and forget the misses--we often remember the times we're successful, and forget the times we fail. It's a bit more complicated, however, because sometimes our failures are our most vivid memories. It turns out that even when we remember our failure, we interpret them in a way that still bolsters our belief. Eileen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, calls it the "Heads I win, tails its chance" phenomenon. As we saw with gamblers' behavior, if we're successful, we think the positive outcome was caused by our knowledge and ability. If we're unsuccessful, we think the negative outcome was caused by something we had no control over. As a result, we reinterpret our failures to be consistent with an overall positive belief in our abilities (p 194)

The line that resonates with me most was "It's a bit more complicated, however, because sometimes our failures are our most vivid memories," but Kida doesn't cite any studies about that aspect.

I understand the phenomenon of attributing success to personal skill, and failure to an outside source. However, aren't there some individuals who consistently believe they will fail and consider all their past to be a completely failure? Does this have something to do with perpetual optimists and pessimists? Just as those overconfident shouldn't believe everything they think, neither should the underconfident or those with low self-esteem do the same. Maybe this paragraph is ok, because it's in the "Overconfidence" section of the "Framing and Other Decision Snags" chapter. Perhaps a corresponding section on "Underconfidence" would be a beneficial addition.

The Langer study Kida refers to is "Heads I Win, Tails It's Chance: The Illusion of Control as a Function of the Sequence of Outcomes in a Purely Chance Task," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 951.

20/20 Hindsight

In Thomas Kida's "20/20 Hindsight" portion of the Framing and Other Decision Snags chapter in his book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, this paragraph struck me for several reasons. The Paul Gallico revelation was stunning, and "the oppressed ethnic group of that time" reminded me of some conversations I'd had with a friend.

At one time, Jews dominated the game. Basketball was primarily an east-coast, inner-city game from the 1920s to the 1940s, and it was played, for the most part, by the oppressed ethnic group of that time--the Jews. Investigative journalist Jon Entine noted that when Jews dominated basketball, sports writers developed many reasons for their superior play. As he states, "Writers opined that Jews were genetically and culturally built to stand up under the strain and stamina of the hoop game. It was suggested that they had an advantage because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes . . . and it was said they were clever" (Entine Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About ItNew York: Public Affairs, 2000 pp 202-203). Paul Gallico, one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, said the reason basketball appealed to Jews was that "the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general amart aleckness" (Shermer,"Blood Sweat and Fears," Skeptic8, no. 1 p 47). Notwithstanding the insulting stereotype, I'm amazed how we think we know the cause for something after the fact--even if that presumed cause is quite absurd.

I discovered Paul Gallico's Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris in one of my used bookstore jaunts cutting high school and really enjoyed it. Later on, I picked up Mrs. 'Arris' New York adventures as well. Since I so thoroughly enjoyed these novels, I was caught off guard to learn about his sports writing on Jewish basketball players.

In the discussion with my friend, we were wondering about the stereotype of gay flight attendants. We thought of the long distance pullman trains in earlier america with black porters. There is an exhibit about them--the discrimination, their camaraderie, etc. in Boston's Back Bay Station. At the time, when there was so much discrimination, being a pullman porter was one of the "allowed" jobs for black men, and they gained prestige in their own communities because they could travel and earned a relatively high income with tips etc. Do gay flight attendants have prestige in the gay world as well? I know this might now be the same as Kida's basketball discussion but this is what came to mind.

Beliefs are like posessions

The last paragraph of Thomas Kida's chapter 5 entitled Seeing Things That Aren't there concludes:

As psychologist Robert Abelson has said, our beliefs are like posessions. We buy our possessions because they have some use to us. So it is with our beliefs. We often hold beliefs not because of the evidence for those beliefs, but because they make us feel good. How can we overcome perceptual biases that lead to faulty beliefs? It's difficult, but a good place to start is by asking three questions:

• (1) Do you want this belief to be true?
  
• (2) Do you expect this event to occur? and
  
• (3) Do you think you would perceive things differently without these wants and expectations?
  

If the answer is yes to these questions, you should be very careful in how you interpret your perceptions of the world. (Kida p 117)

This reminds me of my"Once Burned" blog post where Victor Niederhoffer recalls the no longer useful beliefs of some of his family members. The relative held onto the belief, because it protected him from another loss which he'd previously experienced during the depression.

Kida, Thomas Edward. Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. 2006

Kida cites these two items in his concluding paragraph:

R. Abelson, "Beliefs Are Like Possessions," Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 16 (1986): 222.

Plous, Scott. The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. McGraw Hill: 1993. (p 21)