Sublime

The only difference between the two groups was that the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence.

idea, Diener and his students also found a less-is-more effect, a strong indication that an average (prototype) has been substituted for a sum.

However, the videos were carefully designed to be uninformative; they provided no reason to suspect that the individuals would be either more or less helpful than a randomly chosen student. In the absence of useful new information, the Bayesian solution is to stay with the base rates.

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious

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