2024年5月13日发(作者：hotmail邮箱注册登录)

为什么聪明反被聪明误7.2

Research Shows That the Smarter People Are, the

More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias

为什么聪明反被聪明误

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball

cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more

than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently,

insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and

wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar

and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel

Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been

asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His

disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the

way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists,

and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human

beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—

Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky,

demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to

believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t

carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics.

Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts,

which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts

aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping

the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget

our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that

requires the least mental effort.

Although Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the

most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, his work

was dismissed for years. Kahneman recounts how one eminent

American philosopher, after hearing about his research, quickly

turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of

stupidity.”

The philosopher, it turns out, got it backward. A new study in

the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard

West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the

University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter

people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we

assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why

those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these

universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.

West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and

eighty-two undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of

classic bias problems. Here’s a example:

Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to

divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days.

But that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.