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

Scientific research shows how we ignore granularity and instead engage in categorical thinking, where we put items into buckets and make decisions based on these buckets, not the individual items. A particularly vivid field that does so is ‘disgust research’. Yes, that’s a legitimate research area – and a fertile one, with the University of
... See morewith it and it alone. Bruce is far from an isolated case. US prisoners have spent a total of 30,000 years behind bars for crimes of which they were later exonerated.9 Criminology professors Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock investigated what went wrong in fifty of the most serious overturned convictions.10 There were a number of factors, such as
... See moreKnowing 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
... See moreAmazon 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.
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
... See moreA 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
... See moreDan 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.
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.