Chapter 17The Power of the Unexpected
Unconscious Influence
Over the years I must have given well over a hundred talks touching on the subject of cognitive bias in some way. The residual effect is that anytime something comes up in the news where it appears that someone has fallen prey to it, but doesn't realize it, an article will be forwarded on to me along with the caption, “Thought you'd enjoy this one.” What makes this topic so fascinating to me is the “but doesn't realize it” aspect. A subscriber once remarked to me, “I understand most of what you write about. For me, it's intuitive.”
This belief that “it doesn't apply to me,” is a fundamental aspect of the phenomenon. It's right there in the very definition of cognitive bias. An unconscious influence that produces systematic errors in judgment.
Here's an example of cognitive bias at work. On October 25, 2016, a conference organizer sent me a link to an article about a man who had developed a model for predicting the winner of the US presidential elections, along with the following commentary: “gotta love his quote! => ‘The model predicted a Trump win in February and nothing has changed since then. Whatever happens in the real world doesn't affect the model,' he said.” (Emphasis is the sender's.)
At the time he sent the email it appeared to most that Clinton's victory was all but guaranteed. To the person who sent it to me it seemed ludicrous that the prognosticator mentioned in the article that he wasn't updating his ...