Heuristics and bias

Dr Carl Thompson

Before we start

A quick exercise

Poor judgements in conditions of uncertainty - how and why?

How (bias)

primacy and recency ignoring base rates overconfidence Framing etcetc Representativeness Availablity Anchoring and adjustment

why (heuristics)

What are heuristics?

Limited number of principles that individuals use to make sense of complexity Generally useful but lead to severe and systematic errors Subjective probability estimates similar to physical quantities (size or distance) Clarity! Kahneman and Tversky

Representativeness

P obj A belongs to class B (Dx)? P event A originates from process B (causality) P process B will generate event A (treatment) People rely on representativeness or the degree to which A resembles B.

Representativeness (2)

Common problems with representativeness:

engineers and lawyers*

Insensitivity to prior probabilities of outcomes Insensitivity to sample size and law of small numbers

Large hospital small hospital, childrens IQ

H-T-H-T-T-H

H-H-H-T-T-T H-H-H-H-T-H

Misconceptions of chance Regression towards the mean Base rate neglect

Flight training+

Measuring Depression in oncology vs stroke patients

What you can do

Dont be misled by highly detailed scenarios Whenever possible, pay attention to base rates Remember that chance is not self correcting Dont misinterpret regression towards the mean

availability

P (event) recalled by the ease with which instances can be brought to mind.

Cardiac arrests, predictions of healing careers

Good news - availability is useful because instances of large classes are usually reached better and faster than instances of less frequent classes Bad news availability is affected by factors other than frequency and P.

availability

Plane crashes vs car crashes filling in the gaps Think of a number between 1 and 20

Biases due to retrievability of instances biases of imagine ability Overconfidence makes biases from availability worse

Paths

10 questions

Which has the most paths? xx xxxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxxx xx xx xx

Subjects memory of a film clip of

A car accident (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)
How fast were the cars going when they Smashed? Mean speed 40.8 mph Collided? Mean speed 39.3 mph Bumped? Mean speed 38.1 mph

Hit? Mean speed 34.0 mph

Contacted? Mean speed 31.8 mph

Was there broken glass?

Response Smashed Hit control

Yes
No

16
34

43

44

p.s. there was no broken glass at all in the video clip

What you can do

Maintain accurate records and use them Beware of wishful thinking Break compound events into simple events

Anchoring and adjustment

Estimate the product 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 ??? How thick is a piece of paper if folded in on itself 100 times? Clinical anchors?

Initial estimate of pre-test likelihood of disease (including prevalence). Cognitively cautious (hammond 1967)

conclusions

Judgement and decision research is conducted by human beings who are prone to many of the same biases and errors as their experimental subjects. (Plous 1993)
Heuristics exist for a reason and simply being aware of them can be enough Biases CAN be overcome (ish)

Re calibration Alternative formulations of causes Questioning what if?