May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Explo...

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

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Knowing that criticism will come your way drives you to make your idea as strong as possible beforehand. Researchers will do all they can to pick holes in their own paper before sending it to a discussant. This practice is known as a premortem. In a post-mortem, a decision has flopped and you try to figure out why. In a pre-mortem, you imagine that

Alex Edmans • May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

Amazon thus practises the silent start : it releases the pre-reading only at the beginning of the meeting, and everyone spends half an hour reading it quietly.|| That way, juniors won’t know their superiors’ views, so what they share are genuinely their own opinions.

Alex Edmans • May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

agree with the cure. Another study co-authored by Kahan found that right-wing participants were more willing to accept that climate change is a serious threat if the remedy is geoengineering – launching solar reflectors, injecting aerosol particulates into the stratosphere and capturing carbon to store it in deep geological formations – rather than

Alex Edmans • May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

A final micro-process is to ask those with strong opinions to articulate them in detail. Having to explain something precisely can make people realize they don’t know it as well as they thought, opening them up to different views. Yale psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil demonstrated this with a study.13 They took topics such as how a toi

Alex Edmans • May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

Dan Kahan’s explanation is the cultural cognition hypothesis. People respond to a message based not on the evidence behind it but on the cultural identity it signifies.

Alex Edmans • May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

The whole point of presenting at a conference is that you can only take an idea so far by yourself. There’s no stigma in receiving negative comments – they’re simply expected. If a discussant were ever entirely positive, it would have so little credibility that the audience would think you had incriminating photos of him.