Insight: Errors in judgement come when people are presented with situations in which evidence needed to make a judgement is hard for them to retrieve from memory, or misleading evidence comes easily to mind.
Reference: Tversky and Kahneman: "the use of the availability heuristic leads to bias". Human judgement is distorted by what is memorable.
Insight: Decisions that people make are heavily influenced by the way that choices are presented.
Insight: In many situations, people don't consciously know what they want but take cues from the environment.
Insight: People often take the path of least resistance, even if they pay a heavy price for it, usually in the longer term.
Insight: People often believe that scenarios with more detail are more likely because of "representativeness" (plausiblity because of similarities with other subsets).
Example: Lawyers could effectively make something more believable with more details, even though the additional details make the scenario less likely.
Reference: The Linda Problem: Kahneman and Tversky.
Reference: Seven letter words ending in "ing" vs seven letter words with "n" in the sixth position: Kahneman and Tversky.
Definition: People attach value to what they own, just because they own it.
Insight: People are reluctant to part with their possessions, even if it makes economic sense to do so.
Reference: Thorndike - asked U.S. Army officers to rate men according to physical attributes, then something less tangible like intelligence or leadership. The first ranking impacted the second. If the order was switched, the same thing happened.
Reference: Thorndike based on his observations had: "become convinced that even a very capable foreman, employer, teacher, or department head is unable to view an individual as a compound of separate qualities and to assign a magnitude to each of these in independence of the others."
Definition: The tendency to view an outcome and assume it was predictable all along, even when, given the available information at the time, it was not.
Reference: B.F. Skinner - the idea that all animal behaviour can be driven by external rewards and punishments.
Reference: B.F. Skinner's experiments include putting rats in "Skinner boxes" and teaching them to pull levers and push buttons, and teaching pigeons to dance.
