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 [...]

Behavioural Economics Videos

Behavioural economists have been quick on the uptake in using video lectures to convey their message. Here is a short round-up focusing on quality rather than comprehensiveness.

Book Review: Free Market Madness

Review of Peter A. Ubel (2009) Free Market Madness: Why human nature is at odds with economics  – and why it matters. Harvard Business Press, ISBN:9781422126097
Despite the title, this book sings the praises of the free market. However, it soundly debunks a libertarian free-market fundamentalism that draws its legitimacy from the rational-choice assumptions of economics.
The [...]

Why learn about cognitive bias?

Some thoughts that occurred to me today on why it’s good to be studying cognitive biases:

Making better decisions. Consider the decisions you make in life at your most reflective- not the decisions made when you’re rushed, intoxicated or otherwise distracted. It’s easy for us to convince ourselves that these decisions are the best we can [...]

How managers can be fooled by randomness

Imagine that you employ a lot of people, each of whom works on a similar task. This task is not easy, and they each show different levels of productivity. You have a chart in front of you of each employee’s performance.
A question occurs to you. To improve performance, should you use incentives or punishments? The [...]

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and so are we

Review of Dan Ariely (2008) Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions Harper Collins. ISBN: 978-0-00-725-652-5
This is a gem of a book: short, engagingly-written and connected both to the science and the policy implications. Ariely is a seasoned bias researcher (he sees himself as a behavioural economist rather than a psychologist) and this [...]