THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYjudgements. Other research has found some benefit in educating
people about the heuristics and biases literature in general. Unfortu-
nately, there have also been some setbacks. For example, attempts to
redress the hindsight bias by asking people to list numerous alternative
outcomes for a prior event have actually led them to feel more certain
that the actual outcome was inevitable, perhaps because they found the
hypothetical challenge so difficult.
But the greatest hurdle to successful debiasing is surely the fact
that most of us think we are uniquely immune to the cognitive foibles
which so afflict others. Emily Pronin at Stanford University provided
an amusing demonstration of this when she asked 91 students to
compare themselves with the average student on a range of positive
and negative personality dimensions, including dependability and
selfishness. Not only did 87 percent of the students give themselves
better-than-average ratings, but the vast majority of them stuck by
their ratings even after being told all about the “better-than-average
effect” (also known as the Lake Wobegon Effect, see p.26) – the wide-
spread tendency for most people to think they are better than other
people.
CHOICE BLINDNESS
Perhaps more alarming than these biases and heuristics is other
research suggesting how blind we are to the choices we’re making. In
2005 Petter Johansson and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden
dramatically demonstrated this when they presented participants with
pairs of photographs of women, and asked them to choose which face
in each pair was the more attractive. Sometimes the participants were
asked to justify their choice, in which case the photo they’d chosen was
pushed across the table for them to consider further. Rather sneakily,
Johansson’s team occasionally used sleight of hand to pass a partici-
pant the opposite photo to the one they’d chosen. Bizarrely, on about a
quarter of these sneaky photo-switches, the participants failed to notice
the switch and then went about justifying the choice of a photo they
had just rejected.
This choice blindness, as the researchers called it, is reminiscent of
another decision-making anomaly represented by the infamous, oft-cited
claim “I only read Playboy for the articles”. This is our tendency to deny
the real reasons for our choices, even to ourselves, if those reasons are not
socially acceptable. Zoë Chance and Michael Norton, at Harvard Business