Kevin Drum is trying to list the top ten aspects of human nature that are important but that most people don’t recognize or don’t think about. He’s starting with two:
1. Loss aversion: people really, really hate to lose something they already have and will forego even favorable risks to avoid it.
2. Regression to the mean: an especially strong performance is likely to be followed by a weaker performance and vice versa.
Off the top of my head, I’d add Confirmation Bias and the tendency for humans to project themselves onto their environment. Any other ideas?
I’d add the tendency to become further entrenched in defense of an idea when contradictory facts are presented.
There’s a great article here about how when people with deeply entrenched ideas are presented with facts to the contrary, they stick by their guns – even when proven wrong.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
The advantages of blind faith. Blindly accepting explanations of the world around you gives you more time to do other productive things with your life. If the explanations you accept work for the life you wish to lead, your time is more efficiently spent elsewhere. Note that this does not make the ideas you accept correct, just pragmatic. For those of us who cannot operate without correctly creating a model of the world — those, who like Sagan, believe that “it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring” — we are left spending much of our time working out the details of the truth of the world around us. While I find value in this process, I recognize that I choose to spend my time on it rather than something else that may give me a societal or evolutionary advantage.
Pattern recognition. Humans try to make meaning where there is none.
exactly…
Apophenia, or the compulsion to find patterns in all data sets, is a pretty universal human attribute.
Three posters agreeing on the same topic? I see a conspiracy.
Looks like a pattern to me.
heh heh
VERY interesting topic…I think first of perceptions and sensory illusions…Who’s reality is it? There is a dynamic relationship between descriptions—>senses—->surrounding, all of which holds true to the linear concept of experience. It’s the linear experience that makes it an illusion, don’t you think? Preconceptions can influence how the world is perceived and thus how we act (or do not act). The entire correlation could just be an illusion…
We’re all part of someone else’s hologram.
I’d add .. .whatsit called.. Personal Bias? That tendency to believe that events, beliefs, and circumstances in your own life are common to all others. It’s that bias wherein wealthy folks think they’re ‘middle class’ simply because none of their peers are any different materially than they are.
… which may be an actually far poorer explanation of “projection” in the topic. *cough*
Unappreciated? I think casinos and other institutions that stand to gain from our losses certainly appreciate these aspects an exploit them very well. Notice that the 3 mentioned are all statistical/probabilistic in nature.
It is our job to understand that they apply to ourselves.
Prevarication. And the necessity for it.
I don’t see how regression toward the mean is “human nature.” It’s just math. In a random distribution, you will always get that effect in all things, not just human ones. It just says most results are around average, so if you get one that deviates far from the average, the next will probably just be average again. Not really that deep.
An inability to understand statistics and what they really mean?
Inate solpipsism. That is, my universe is the universe as far as I am concerned. because it is the only one I can perceive with certainty Everything else we are falls into that framework.
The “fundamental attribution error”: we explain our own poor behavior as attributable entirely to the circumstances, but regard poor behavior in others as mainly attributable to their character.
Good one.
Agreed. I was going to suggest this one and was glad to see it had already been noted.