Friday, July 19, 2019

The Psychology of Gullibility

As I complete my reading for my book report, "How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life" by Thomas Gilovich, I did a little bit of research about the author and came across a lecture he did on "The Psychology of Gullibility", which I found both interesting and relevant to our coursework.

One of the most interesting topics he covers in this lecture is the theory that humans see order in random stimuli. This simple concept help explains so many things in human nature that otherwise well-informed people believe in despite any concrete evidence. The inherent pattern detection abilities of the human mind are what make people believe they see, for example, religious faces in random places, or patterns in winning lottery numbers, when there is no evidence, statistical or otherwise, that these patterns exist. Gilovich further explains that these pattern detection abilities have been shown to be stronger (and thereby less statistically accurate) when we feel "out of control". Humans find more order in random stimuli than normal when they feel out of control, perhaps explaining things such as hearing subliminal messaging in popular music, "streak" performance in sports, or even gambling addictions. While the psychology of these things (and humans in general) is infinitely more complicated and intricate than this simple concept, it goes a long way in explaining many of the idiosyncrasies that we see in many people and situations each and every day.

Check the lecture out on Vimeo, Gilovich covers several topics related to what we've been reading about this semester and provides many interesting real-life examples.

Also, his Wikipedia page covers some of his notable contributions in biases and heuristics research...very interesting information!

1 comment:

  1. I completely agree and relate to finding order in random stimuli when feeling out of control. I can easily pin point times in my life where I would feel overwhelmed and look at something and make it into something it was not. This topic is really interesting and something that I will totally look into!