Science shows why business is stupid

Another excellent talk from TED.com about behavioural economics (to add to those already covered on this blog). Dan Pink, a former speech writer for Al Gore, explains how a lot of business practice still relies on extrinsic motivation which is known scientifically to be counter-productive (explained previously on this blog). He echoes Phil Rozenweig’s charge [...]

The friendship paradox

Reading today about illusory superiority to improve the Wikipedia article, I came across something tangential but intellectually delightful.
Most people have fewer friends than their friends (on average) have.
When I first read it, it sounded impossible, but it’s a practically inevitable fact.
It’s not specifically about friendship, but a mathematical fact about any relation which is symmetrical [...]

The biased search for confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the bias to seek for, interpret and remember information in ways that confirm our existing beliefs rather than genuinely test them. In general, it’s an irrational preference for information that matches our expectations. This is one of the first biases I learned about, but recently I’ve been reading up on it in [...]

What makes humans happy?

Last week I gave a talk about happiness research. Here are some notes for posterity. I haven’t deliberately sought out happiness research, but bias research (my area of interest) overlaps with it a great deal.
First, a disclaimer. When we talk about one group being happier than another, we’re talking about the average of a large [...]

Book Review: Mistakes were Made (but not by Me)

Review of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007) Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. ISBN 978-0151010981 (Hardback), 978-1905177219 (Paperback)
For clear, engaging explanations of psychological research, this is one of the best books you can get. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions, distorting our [...]

Attribute substitution- a quick guide

Noticing that there wasn’t an article about this concept on Wikipedia, I’ve written the following and donated it to start off an article. The GNU Free Documentation license applies. (Updated 2 June. 20 hours after its creation, the article is the number four hit for its title on Google UK!)
Attribute Substitution is a psychological process [...]

Book Review: Never Saw It Coming

Review of Karen A. Cerulo (2006) Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. ISBN 9780226100333
This starts out so well, but wanders into such dubious and frankly mad territory that I can’t recommend it. The theme of the book is how we find it difficult to define or imagine the worst: in particular, [...]

Daily Mail campaigning both for and against vaccination

Via The Lay Scientist: Nauseating tabloid The Daily Mail publishes editions in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Like a lot of the UK press, it’s taking part in an irresponsible and anti-scientific campaign to deny people life-saving vaccines (the cervical cancer vaccine in this case), but the Irish edition is campaigning for [...]

Book Review: The Halo Effect

The Halo Effect: How managers let themselves be deceived by Phil Rosenzweig. ISBN: 978-1-84739-336-4
Business academic Rosenzweig has written a definitive book about critical thinking in the context of business success. A lot of people claim to understand why businesses succeed or fail, whether in journalism such as Fortune magazine, in bestselling books such as In [...]

New Scientist: Religious books masquerading as science

Hooray for the mighty Wikileaks, preserving for us the New Scientist article “How to spot a hidden religious agenda” that the magazine itself has taken off its web site for legal reasons.
The piece is important and deserves a wider discussion. The “science” shelves of a high street bookshop put outright pseudo-science right alongside popularisations of [...]