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Famous Reid Hastie Quotes

“A more serious consequence of the illusion of control is revealed in our preference for driving over flying. At least part of this irrational—from a survival point of view—habit is due to the fact that we “feel in control” when driving, but not when flying. The probability of dying in a cross-country flight is approximately equal to the probability of dying in a 12-mile drive— in many cases, the most dangerous part of the trip is over when you reach the airport (Sivak & Flannagan, 2003). Gerd Gigerenzer (2006) estimates that the post-9/11 shift from flying to driving in the United States resulted in an additional 1,500 deaths, beyond the original 3,000 immediate victims of the terrorist attacks.”

PsychologySafetyStatisticsProbabilityCognitive BiasesCar AccidentsTransportation SystemsFlying Accidents
Book:Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
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“Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.”

PsychologyStatisticsProbabilityRational ThinkingCausalityCognitive BiasesEvidence Based Decision MakingStatistical Evidence
Book:Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
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“Perhaps the fundamental precept of probabilistic analysis is the exhortation to take a bird’s-eye, distributional view of the situation under analysis (e.g., a dice game, the traffic in Boulder, crimes in Pittsburgh, the situation with that troublesome knee) and to define a sample space of all the possible events and their logical, set membership interrelations. This step is exactly where rational analysis and judgments based on availability, similarity, and scenario construction diverge: When we judge intuitively, the mind is drawn to a limited, systematically skewed subset of the possible events. In the case of scenario construction, for example, we are often caught in our detailed scenario—focused on just one preposterously specific outcome path.”

IntuitionDecision MakingStatisticsProbabilityRational ThinkingBig PictureBiasesCognitive BiasesProbabilistic Analysis
Book:Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
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