Discretion is the Worse Part of Equity
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Post No.: 0724   Furrywisepuppy says:   With the benefit of hindsight – after you’ve seen the correct answer/outcome – many things appear like they should’ve been ‘obvious’ before, when they weren’t. Also, if you lack the knowledge of, or … Read More

Please Shut Your Noise!
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Post No.: 0714   Furrywisepuppy says:   Following Post No.: 0702 and our quest to reduce noise – interviews, reviews or assessments should be structured rather than informal or ad hoc so that each subject receives the exact same set … Read More

How to Minimise Unwanted Variability in Assessments
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Post No.: 0702   Furrywisepuppy says:   We had learned from Fluffystealthkitten in Post No.: 0689 that inconsistent verdicts don’t cancel each other out. So what can we do to tackle the noise or unwanted variability in professional assessments or … Read More

Inconsistent Verdicts Don’t Cancel Each Other Out
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Post No.: 0689   Fluffystealthkitten says:   Due to the ‘false consensus effect’, we assume others see the world as we do, hence we assume everyone would come to the same conclusions as we would based on the same presented … Read More

The Unfairness of Noisy, Capricious Judgements
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Post No.: 0681   Furrywisepuppy says:   We’ve talked heck aplenty about biases in this blog. But there’s another collection of problems that affects human judgements that’s equally as important to recognise…   Whereas bias is analogous to having all … Read More

‘A’ Doesn’t Necessarily Mean ‘B’
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Post No.: 0670   Furrywisepuppy says:   We intuitively desire and gravitate towards simple internal models of the world over handling its true complex nature, hence we have a tendency to simplify our understanding of the actual world to the … Read More

Your Carefully Curated Public Image
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Post No.: 0664   Fluffystealthkitten says:   As everybody knows, carefully manicuring one’s own public image isn’t always about honestly conveying the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth with one-to-one fidelity but about emphasising and exaggerating what one … Read More

Dread Risk and How Some Deaths Seem Worse than Others
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Post No.: 0655   Furrywisepuppy says:   The tragedies that have been most recently reported in the press become more conspicuous, salient or ‘available’ in our minds. We consequently tend to overestimate their risk. This can happen with recent aeroplane … Read More

Machiavellianism and Manipulation
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Post No.: 0642   Furrywisepuppy says:   Most people care about their ‘self-presentation’ almost above all else – image and perceived reputation matters. Most people, without knowing it, will constantly adapt their words and actions to suit different audiences in … Read More

The Planning Fallacy and Overconfidence
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Post No.: 0630   Furrywisepuppy says:   The ‘planning fallacy’ occurs when one estimates unrealistically close to the best-case scenario thus ends up being overoptimistic about a task. It’s an extremely frequent and widespread fallacy committed by individuals, businesses, governments … Read More

Our Perception of Time
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Post No.: 0622   Furrywisepuppy says:   We’ve been learning throughout this blog that our brains don’t interpret the physical world or reality objectively – there are individualised interpretations of the world and our brains interpret the world according to … Read More

Advertising and ‘The Engineering of Consent’
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Post No.: 0611   Furrywisepuppy says:   Advertising isn’t just about products and brands – adverts convey a whole host of other social and cultural information such as norms, stereotypes, values, gender roles, how to ‘supposedly’ live, what our houses … Read More

The Representativeness Heuristic on Our Judgements
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Post No.: 0588   Furrywisepuppy says:   One of the most basic heuristics of ‘system one’ is to represent things in categories, with conceptions of norms and prototypical exemplars that things that belong to a particular category are perceived to … Read More

Signalling Theory and Displays of Fitness
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Post No.: 0584   Furrywisepuppy says:   ‘Signalling theory’ is about conveying signals to other individuals that, ostensibly, display one’s genetic fitness or some other desirable trait. The purpose could be for trying to gain a potential mate’s attention or … Read More

Our Preferences are Shaped by What Options are Presented
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Post No.: 0576   Furrywisepuppy says:   If our rule of thumb when uncertain is to just ‘pick the middle option’ then what we pick will logically be affected by what options are presented. So we might pick a wine … Read More

How We Come to Our Decisions
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Post No.: 0549   Furrywisepuppy says:   During decision conflicts, different cognitive networks are competing with each other – for example, reason versus emotion, satisfying our present versus our future desires, reading the word or the colour of the word … Read More

Tailor Your Arguments to Your Audience
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Post No.: 0537   Fluffystealthkitten says:   When you present your arguments and you want to motivate action from others – choosing the right framing for the audience in front of you is crucial. How are your arguments directly relevant … Read More

Base Rates, Base Rate Neglect and Bayesian Thinking
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Post No.: 0526   Furrywisepuppy says:   Firstly some definitions – the base rate, prevalence or prior probability (which term gets used depends on the context) is the probability of some thing or event occurring, such as the percentage of … Read More

Introverts, Shyness and the Spotlight Effect
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Post No.: 0519   Furrywisepuppy says:   The modern world tends to reward extroverts with more fame than introverts, even though it’s the introverts behinds the scenes who mostly make the modern world happen as they work on their computers … Read More

The Misattribution of Sources, Memories and Emotions
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Post No.: 0510   Furrywisepuppy says:   We often focus on a fact or story whilst ignoring the source of that fact (or ‘fact’) or story, even though the source will help tell us the reliability of it. We could … Read More

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