Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [360]
An even more disquieting finding came from a later experiment in which they posed two versions of a public-health problem to groups of college students. The versions are mathematically identical but different in wording. The first version:
Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of a rare Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is a ⅓ probability that 600 people will be saved, and a ⅔ probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor?
The second version gave the same story but worded the alternatives as follows:
If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted, there is a ⅓ probability that nobody will die, and a ⅔ probability that 600 people will die.
Subjects responded quite differently to the two versions: 72 percent chose Program A over Program B, but 78 percent (of a different group) chose Program D over Program C. Kahneman and Tversky’s explanation: In the first version, the outcomes are portrayed in terms of gains (lives saved), in the second version in terms of losses (lives lost). The same biases as shown by the experiments where money was at stake distorted subjects’ judgment in this case, where lives were at stake.85 (In
2002, Kahneman won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on probabilistic reasoning; Tversky, who would have shared it, unfortunately was dead by then.)
We reason poorly in these cases because the factors involved are “nonintuitive”; our minds do not readily grasp the reality involved in probabilities. This shortcoming affects us both individually and as a society; the electorate and its leaders often make costly decisions because of poor probabilistic reasoning. As Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross point out in their book Human Inference, many governmental practices and policies adopted during crises are deemed beneficial because of what happens afterward, even though the programs are often useless or worse. The misjudgment is caused by the human tendency to attribute a result to the action meant to produce it, although often the result stems from the normal tendency of events to revert from the unusual to the usual.86
It is reassuring, therefore, that a number of studies have found that unconscious mental processing often yields good evaluations and decisions—sometimes better than the results of conscious deliberation. In a series of studies reported in 2004, a Dutch psychologist asked subjects to make choices about complex real-world matters that had many positive and negative features such as choosing an apartment. One group was told to make an immediate (no thought) choice, another group to think for three minutes and then choose (conscious thought), and a third group to work for three minutes on a difficult distracting task and then choose (unconscious thought). In all three studies, the subjects in the unconscious thought condition made the best choices.87
Analogical reasoning: By the 1970s, cognitive psychologists had begun to recognize that much of what logicians regard as faulty reasoning is, in fact, “natural” or “plausible” reasoning—inexact, loose, intuitive, and technically invalid, but often competent and effective.
One such form of thinking is the analogical. Whenever we recognize that a problem is analogous to a different problem, one we are familiar with and know the answer to, we make a leap of thought to a solution. Many people, for instance, when they have to assemble a piece of knocked-down furniture or machinery, ignore the instruction manual and work by “feel”—looking for relationships among the parts that are analogous to the relationships among the parts of different