Category: Psychology

Psychology: Repeated Voice = Majority Opinion

If there is one loud-mouth in your group who keeps repeating his opinion over and over again, can easily give the impression that this is the opinion of the whole group.

See this post for:

The study, carried out by Kimberlee Weaver and colleagues, found we can tell that three different people expressing the same opinion better represents the group than one person expressing the same opinion three times – but not by much.

In fact, if one person in a group repeats the same opinion three times, it has 90% of the effect of three different people in that group expressing the same opinion. When you think about it, that is strange. Indeed, I’m not sure I’d even believe it if I hadn’t already read many other psychology studies that point to the illogical and unreasonable ways our minds sometimes work.

See full article. You might think that intelligent people can easily make out that it’s just one person repeating his opinion, as opposed to the whole group. But you might be wrong. It is fascinating how easy it is to mislead intelligent people. Read my other posts in the psychology section for more examples of this kind of stuff.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths(?) About Human Nature

See this intriguing post, which as the title states, is a bunch of very politically incorrect “truths” about human nature. I have a feeling that the author has only presented one side of the argument in many cases. In other words, I feel that, at least in some cases (most notably #6 the Trivers-Willard hypothesis), unproven theories have been presented as facts without presenting the arguments or evidence against them.

Notwithstanding the lack of rigor in separating facts from theories, it still makes for very interesting reading. At the very least, these are all “plausible” theories, and do have a possibility of being true. For example:

Men strive to attain political power, consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. Reproductive access to women is the goal, political office but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.

Read the full article. Certainly worth it. You don’t have to believe it all, but think about it…

Dunning-Kruger effect – Idiots have more confidence than the good guys

A study by researchers in Cornell university in 1999 found that idiots overestimate their abilities, and the good guys underestimate them. Also, the idiots fail to recognize good qualities in others. From the wikipedia

  • incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
  • incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
  • incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
  • if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

See full article. It is left as an exercise to the motivated reader to figure out what this means if a manager is incompetent (e.g. in terms of hiring).