Reflections, Reflections

I find this a very interesting subject: Humans, in large numbers and to a large extent, fail miserably when it comes to rational decision making and correct assessment of reality.

From “Biases in Social Judgment:”

Humans are biased toward confirming their theories, are naively optimistic, take undue credit for lucky accomplishments, and fail to recognize their self-inflicted failures. Moreover, they overestimate the number of others who share their beliefs, demonstrate the hindsight bias, have a poor conception of chance, perceive illusory relationships between noncontingent events, and have an exaggerated sense of control. Failures at rationality do not end there. Humans use external appearances as an erroneous gauge of internal character, falsely believe that their own desirable qualities are unique, can be induced to remember events that never occurred, and systematically misperceive the intentions of the opposite sex. (Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss)

In my opinion, culture (in the fullest anthropological/sociological and psychological sense) is largely responsible for the above, but it would be nice if we didn’t depend on culture to form humans who would do better on all those aspects.

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