The best psychologists (besides actual psychologists) would have to be salespeople. They’ve learned lots of ways to exploit all our cognitive funny bits.
Case in point: a grocer friend of mine has alerted me to an interesting tendency among shop-goers. Say you’ve got a big pile of oranges, but with one spotty one featured prominently. Even though all the other oranges look great, they’ll all stay right where they are. No one will touch them until you remove the bad one. Then they’ll start to move again.
In this case, people are making assumptions involving sampling bias. We may believe that most of the oranges are good, but that one prominent bad orange is somehow more salient than the others, and we weight it more heavily when deciding how good the rest of them are. Perhaps the bad orange is more salient than all the good oranges because of the ‘Minimax principle‘ — we want good outcomes, but we often just try to avoid bad outcomes.
This also reminds me of the ‘Volvo fallacy‘, where a negative anecdote can overrule more reliable information.
13 June 2006 at 10:00 am
this may be obvious and it is unrelated to your blog, thus you may dislike this comment for two reasons but i need answers!
in english, what is the plural of Jesus, ie if there is a group of men called Jesus, what do we call them?
13 June 2006 at 4:01 pm
See new post.