In an interview on Decision-Making

Your next choice is How We Know What Isn’t So by psychologist Thomas Gilovich.

This is a really smart book and the reason I put it on there is that it really invented the genre of science non-fiction. Gilovich did some very interesting work (actually with Tversky when he was still at Cornell) including on the ‘hot hand’ effect. This refers to basketball when players think they have a ‘hot hand’. They make three shots in a row: fans think they’re in the zone. But actually the hot hand is a cognitive illusion. After making a couple of shots in a row, players actually get over-confident and become less likely to make their next shot. So the book is filled with case studies like that, clever demonstrations that so much of what we perceive in the world, and then use to act on, is actually based on cognitive illusions. So this book is very accessible. It was very popular and demonstrated for the first time that people love to learn about their biases. There’s really something fascinating about reading your own user manual and going, ‘Oh that’s what made me do that stupid thing all the time!’

What kind of cognitive illusions does it home in on?

If you want to summarise it, a large part of the book is about positive information bias – the fact that we like to believe that we’re right and so we ignore all sorts of evidence that suggests we might be wrong. That’s why conservatives watch Fox and liberals watch MSNBC. Which isn’t the biggest revelation in the world – but there’s all sorts of clever studies that demonstrate this again and again, that show just how blinded and blinkered we are. We think we’re so objective, but there’s actually nothing objective about the human mind. We have these working beliefs and we seek evidence to confirm beliefs: that, unfortunately, is the best summary of how we seek out evidence.