thoughtcrumbs

Social psychologists gone wild

There's some, er, debate in the psychology world about the extent to which heuristics, or mental shortcuts, cause people to make significant errors in judgment. Plenty of lab experiments (many at CMU) have shown people to make seemingly stupid statistical mistakes, like lottery players who don't pick a certain number because it won yesterday. (For a review, see Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

But another camp (see Gigerenzer, 1996) argues that laboratory experiments set up artificial, unfamiliar scenarios intentionally designed to trick people. They suggest that heuristics generally serve people very well.

So, a member of Camp 2 (Gigerenzer) came to speak at CMU a few years ago. You'd expect a rational debate among experienced intellectuals. But no. As one attendee described:

It was the best-attended talk I'd ever seen. Like in high school, when someone yells "Fight! Fight!" and everyone crowds in.