The Human Side of Postmortems by Dave Zwieback

Author:Dave Zwieback
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Workplace Culture
ISBN: 9781449365851
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

This is one of the three questions on a Cognitive Reflection Test — questions that were selected because they reliably evoke an immediate and incorrect answer[16]. You are in good company if your quick and intuitive answer is “100 minutes” — 90% of participants of an experiment involving Princeton students answered at least one of the three CRT questions incorrectly. Still, the unintuitive and correct answer is “5 minutes.”

What’s going on here? As we’ve seen, System 1 thinking quickly and efficiently provides what you might call a first approximation assessment of a situation, or the effortlessly intuitive answer to the question above. And in the vast majority of cases, System 1 thinking functions superbly. For instance, being able to quickly spot something that looks like a leopard is an important function of System 1. When System 1 produces a mistake — if, for instance, what looks like a leopard turns out to be an old lady in a leopard-print coat — from an evolutionary point of view, it may be vastly better to be wrong while quickly running away than to be mauled by a hungry leopard while taking the time to thoroughly analyze the potential attacker. That is, unless you, as a result, quickly run into crosstown traffic, in which case it would have been far better to slow down and actually evaluate the probability of meeting a leopard in midtown Manhattan!

System 1 is expert at quickly jumping to conclusions. It does so by employing mental shortcuts — heuristics — “which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors,”[17] otherwise known as cognitive biases.

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