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How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

Book by Thomas Gilovich · 3 quotes · Human Behavior, Logic, Mind

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How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life Quotes

“it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked”

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Book:How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
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“How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data.”

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Book:How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
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