73: “. . . while ‘all possible causes’ is bland and empty. It leaves Gut cold.” See Eric Johnson et al., Framing, Probability Distortions, and Insurance Decisions, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 7(1): 35-51.
74: “. . . raising risk estimates by 144 percent.” See Affect Generalization and the Perception of Risk, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 20-31.
75: “Beloved grandfathers are not necessary.” One of the stranger demonstrations of the mere exposure effect involves asking people to choose which of two images they prefer. One is a photograph of their face the way it actually is. The other is the same image reversed. Most people choose the face that is reversed. Why? Because that’s what they see every morning in the mirror.
76: “. . . the Penguins’ penalty time rose 50 percent to 12 minutes a game.” Does the black uniform mean referees perceive the team more negatively and therefore judge them more strictly than they otherwise would? Or does the black uniform inspire players to be more aggressive? Both, the researchers concluded. See M. G. Frank and T. Gilovich, The Dark Side of Social and Self-Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sport, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54:11, 74-85.
79: “. . . bias in favor of the ‘lean’ beef declined but was still evident.” Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth, How Consumers Are Affected by the Framing of Attribute Information Before and After Consuming the Product, The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1988.
80: “Feeling trumped numbers. It usually does.” See Cass Sunstein’s Laws of Fear.
82: “. . . a good chance I won’t even think about that.” See Robin Hogarth and Howard Kunreuther, Decision Making Under Ignorance, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1995.
CHAPTER FIVE
91: “. . . in a way that the phrase ‘almost 3,000 were killed’ never can.” This summary of the life of Diana O’Connor comes from the remarkable obituaries the New York Times prepared of every person who died in the attack. The series ran for months and garnered a huge readership.
93: “Only data—properly collected and analyzed—can do that.” The reader will notice that anecdotes abound within this book. My point here is not to dismiss stories, only to note that, however valuable they may be in many circumstances, anecdotes have serious limitations.
94: " ’... the deaths of millions is a statistic,’ ” said that expert on death, Joseph Stalin.” Psychologists call this the “identifiable victim effect.” For a discussion, see, for example, George Loewenstein, Deborah Small, and Jeff Strnad, Statistical, Identifiable and Iconic Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 301, March 2005.
94: “. . . empathetic urge to help generated by the profile of the little girl.” Even in relatively unemotional situations—the sort in which we may assume that calm calculation would dominate—numbers have little sway. Psychologists Eugene Borgida and Richard Nisbett set up an experiment in which groups of students at the University of Michigan were asked to look at a list of courses and circle those they thought they might like to take in future. One group did this with no further information. A second group listened to brief comments about the courses delivered in person by students who had taken the courses previously. These presentations had a “substantial impact” on students’ choices, the researchers found. Finally, a third group was given the average rating earned by each course in a survey of students who had taken the courses previously: In sharp contrast with the personal anecdotes, the data had no influence at all.
95: “. . . mattered less than the profile.” Kahneman and Tversky dubbed this “base-rate neglect.”
99: “. . . more about the power of Gut-based judgments than they do about cancer.” For a good overview, see Atul Gawande, The Cancer-Cluster Myth, The New Yorker, February 8, 1998.
CHAPTER SIX
109: “. . . go along with the false answers they gave.” Robert Baron, Joseph Vandello, and Bethany Brunsman, The Forgotten Variable in Conformity Research: The Impact of Task Importance on Social Influence, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71:915-927.
111: "The correct rule is actually ‘any three numbers in ascending order.’ ” There are other rules that would also work. What matters is simply that the rule is not “even numbers increasing by two.”
112: “. . . more convinced that they were right and those who disagreed were wrong.” Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper, Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979.
113: “. . . when they processed neutral or positive information.” See D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Public Affairs, New York, 2007.
118: "... illicit drugs aren’t as dangerous as commonly believed . . .” A thorough discussion of the real risks of drugs is outside the scope of this book, but readers who wish to pursue it are encouraged to read Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes.
118: “. . . drug education as ‘superficial, lurid, excessively negative. . . .” Why have you never heard of this report? Because the government of the United States successfully buried it. In a May 1995 meeting, according to the WHO’s records—and confirmed to me by a WHO spokesman—Neil Boyer, the American representative to the organization, “took the view that . . . (the WHO’s) program on substance abuse was headed in the wrong direction . . . . if WHO activities relating to drugs failed to reinforce proven drug-control approaches, funds for the relevant programs should be curtailed.” Facing a major loss of funding, the WHO backed down at the last minute. Although a press release announcing the report was issued, the report itself was never officially released. The author has a copy on file.
119: “Higher perceived risk is always better.” See, for example, the Web site of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov ), where documents routinely tout higher risk perceptions as evidence of success but seldom consider whether those perceptions are out of line with reality.
119: “. . . killed far more people than all the illicit drugs combined.” A 2004 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, puts the annual death toll inflicted by alcohol at 85,000; all illicit drugs were responsible for 17,000 deaths. See Ali H. Mokdad, Actual Causes of Death in the United States. 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association 291:1238-1245. Gaps between the two causes of death are even larger in other countries.
121: “Not a problem in the hands of law-abiding citizens.” Kahan’s research and more is available on the website of the Cultural Cognition Project at the Yale University Law School. research.yale.edu/culturalcognition/