People all the way

Working with people is already hard enough, with all their individual quirks, moods, emotions, hidden motives, competencies (or lack thereof), fears, ambitions, etc. 

What makes it doubly, triply, frustratingly hard sometimes is that we are working with people who themselves have to work with people, and who in turn have to work with people.  It’s people all the way down.

7 Deadly Sins – Illusory Correlation

Or ‘magical thinking’ as Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini calls it.  This is about making positive correlations even though the supporting data is weak.  Sometimes we notice only data that supports our hypothesis and ignore data that doesn’t.

An example of magical thinking goes like this. We come across a few people who exhibit a certain symptom and also a certain illness, and we associate that symptom with the illness, such that if we see that symptom, then we decide that the illness is also present.

You see someone with red spots, and you diagnose measles.

We forget that sometimes the same symptom appears for a different illnes.  Or the illness is present without that symptom.

7 Deadly Sins – Overconfidence

Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini writes in his deliciously written book “Inevitable Illusions” about the 7 deadly sins of our cognitive illusions.

His first sin is overconfidence. This is where we feel certain about our knowledge of something, but our knowledge does not really warrant such confidence.

He describes experiments where subjects are asked to answer questions and then rate how confident they are about each answer.  Experiments show that our confidence leads our knowledge.

We think we know something more than we really know.

The results of the experiments also bring about something sobering: we are most overconfident in areas we are more knowledgeable about.  That is, the difference between the level of our overconfidence and knowledge in these areas is bigger than the difference between our level of overconfidence and knowledge in other areas - hence we tend to make mistakes of overconfidence in our areas of expertise.