Reasons for Unreason 

 Ψ  Four reasons for unreason - common ways in which we form or sustain false beliefs:    
 
    •  Preconceptions (colored by overconfidence) control interpretations. 
     •  Swayed by vivid anecdotes rather than statistics. (availability heuristic - Base Rate Fallacy) 
      •  Misperceive correlation & control. (illusory correlation - Illusion of Control) 
       •  Beliefs can generate conclusions. (self-fulfilling prophecies) 

  Ψ  The availability heuristic (a.k.a. The Anecdotal Fallacy) is a rule that we tend to apply when we make 
judgments. This mental shortcut suggests that we give importance to things that are easier to recall to mind & 
we give less importance to things that are harder to recall. There are circumstances in which the Availability 
Heuristic leads to false results. Unusual events do happen, & if they happen to us then we tend to overestimate 
their likeliness when using the heuristic. 

    The Base Rate Fallacy is our tendency to ignore information that describes most people and 
to be influenced by the distinctive features of the case being studied.     

   The Base Rate Fallacy is the belief that probability rates are false. When presented with statistics 
about the population as a whole, people tend to ignore them & think about themselves as completely 
different entities. For example someone has the symptoms of a disease which takes two forms, 
both fatal, requiring two different medicines. Only one medicine can be taken & medicine A does not 
work for form B of the disease & medicine B does not work for form A of the disease. Form A of the 
disease occurs 10% of the time in the population whilst form B occurs 90% of the time. After taking an 
80% reliable A/B test it says that this person has form A of the disease. Therefore this person is likely 
to take the treatment for form A of the disease despite a 20% chance that he could have form B & only 
10% of people in the population have form A. This is because people are not concerned with statistics, 
they are concerned with themselves.      

Ψ  An illusory correlation can occur when two things that "stand out" or are more 
salient are seen as going together, when in actuality there is no relationship between them.

Ψ  Illusion of control is the tendency for human beings to believe they can control, or at least influence, 
outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.       
  
  •  Illusion of control involves the idea that chance events are subject to our influence, e.g. when gambling. 
  Research has found that people act as if they can predict or control chance outcomes.       
  
  •  Illusion of control arises when we fail to recognize the phenomenon of regression towards the average (mean). 
  Regression toward the mean is the tendency for any series mathematical events to average out. This simply 
  means that events like extreme test scores or 'holes-in-one' tend to happen rarely. We can't count on them to 
  repeat, but occasionally we do.  
   
    Ψ  The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy (a.k.a. the Pygmalion effect) can be summarized as follows;

           •  Expectations of people or events are formed. 
            • The expectations with various cues are communicated. 
             •  People tend to respond to these cues by changing their behavior to match them. 
              •  The original expectation then becomes true.
              
   Ψ  A special type of self-fulfilling prophecy that has engendered particular interest among social psychologists 
is behavioral confirmation, in which people's social expectations lead then to behave in ways that cause others to confirm 
their expectations.

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                                                             Social Psychology
                                                                Robert C. Gates