Tagarchief: Psychology

Zelfingenomenheid als risico

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Paul Wouters | 2007

Mij is verzocht tot nader order als columnist te fungeren, met als bijzondere opdracht om ‘de zelfingenomen Hollander’ – de kwalificatie is niet afkomstig van deze Belg! – af en toe eens een spiegel voor te houden. Het schijnt deze mensensoort soms aan reflectie te ontbreken.

Het spreekt vanzelf dat ik mijn opdrachtgever op zijn wenken wil bedienen. Zet u schrap, beste lezer, ik zal beginnen met u te testen. Ik leg u zo dadelijk vijf onnozele vragen voor. Vriendelijk verzoek deze te beantwoorden door middel van een 90% confidentie-interval. Met andere woorden: doe géén gooi naar het correcte antwoord, maar schrijf twee getallen op zó dat u voor 90% zeker bent (dus heel zeker) dat het correcte antwoord zich daartussen bevindt.

Hier zijn de vragen:

1. Wat is de afstand in kilometer tussen de aarde en de maan?
2. In welk jaar werd het Colloseum in Rome voltooid?
3. In welk jaar werd Mahatma Gandhi geboren?
4. Wat is de oppervlakte in vierkante kilometer van de Middellandse Zee?
5. Wat is de draagtijd van de blauwe vinvis in dagen?

Het aardigste is om hier collega’s of gezinsgenoten bij te betrekken. Overleg niet over de schattingen, maar vergelijk met elkaar de gegeven intervallen. Verbaas u over de mate waarin ze uit elkaar lopen. Ga naar het einde voor de correcte antwoorden en check hoe vaak die antwoorden zich buiten uw interval bevinden.

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Met zekerheid in onzekerheid

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Over innovatie en het nemen van innovatierisico’s.  Afscheidsrede van Prof. dr. ir. J.I.M. Halman, University of Twente 

Joop Halman | oktober 2018

“In het jaar voorafgaande aan dit afscheidscollege heb ik met enige regel- maat gemijmerd wat het afscheid nemen van mijn werk aan de universiteit voor mij zou betekenen. Ik kon mij daar eerlijk gezegd nog niet veel bij voorstellen. Ik voelde en voel mij in een prima conditie, waarom zou je dan stoppen terwijl je het gevoel hebt dat je net goed op stoom bent?”

Prof. dr. ir. J.I.M. Halman

De afscheidsrede gaat onder meer in op de categorisering van risico’s, op de concrete risico’s in innovatieprojecten en bevat een uitgebreide lijst met gezaghebbende referenties en publicaties. De afscheidsrede bevat een verhandeling (p.15-p.27) inzake innovatie en het nemen van risico’s in innovatieprojecten.

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The Undoing Project

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A Friendship that Changed the World

Michael Lewis | 2017, W.W. Norton & Company

This is the extraordinary story of the two men whose ideas changed the world. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Kahneman, a rootless son of Holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved, and Tversky, a voluble, instinctual blur of energy.

In this breathtaking new book, Michael Lewis tells the extraordinary story of a relationship that became a shared mind: one which created the field of behavioural economics, revolutionising everything from Big Data to medicine, from how we are governed to how we spend, from high finance to football.

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Sources of Power

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How People Make Decisions

Gary Klein | 1999, MIT Press

Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision-making based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings view people as biased and unskilled.

Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. It documents human strengths and capabilities that have been downplayed or ignored so far.

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Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

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Biases in judgments reveal some heuristics of thinking under uncertainty

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman | 1974

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty: (i) representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.

These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and the biases they lead to could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.

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Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy

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Andrew Healy, Loyola Marymount University, and Neil Malhotra, Stanford University | 2009

In our democratic system, citizens vote for their representative politicians, elected councils, public leaders, governors, and governing councils. But what about citizens’ perceptions of how risks are handled by their leaders, and what about citizens’ appreciation of proactive thinking by councillors related to public risks when it comes to voting?

Quote: “Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, not investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses.”

“We estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates.”

“By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.”

Bibliography

Healy, A. and Malhotra, N. (2009) Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy. American Political Science Review: Vol. 103, No. 3 August

Download the scientific article

Thinking, Fast and Slow

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Daniel Kahneman | 2013

In this fascinating treatise by a giant in the field of decision research, the mind is a hilariously muddled compromise between incompatible modes of thought.

Psychologist Kahneman positions a brain governed by two clashing decision-making processes. The largely unconscious System 1, he contends, makes intuitive snap judgments based on emotion, memory, and hard-wired rules of thumb and the painfully conscious System 2 laboriously checks the facts and does the math but is so “lazy” and distractible that it usually defers to System 1.

Kahneman uses this scheme to frame a scintillating discussion of his findings in cognitive psychology and behavioural economics and of the ingenious experiments that tease out the irrational, self-contradictory logics that underlie our choices.

All the factors described play a direct and indirect role in public governance. All public leaders and managers should be aware of the thoroughly described systems of our brains and behaviour. They make things clear and understandable. The book is an epiphany.

Bibliography

Kahneman, D. (2013) Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux