第49页 Seeing what we expect to see

Where does systematic error in human judgment and reasoning come from? Two examples?
- We use informal rules and strategies that simplify fundamentally difficult problems to solve them without excessive efforts, which leads to occasional systematic error 
- representativeness: causes resemble its effects (big effects should have big causes)
- how expectations, preconceptions, and prior beliefs influence our interpretation of new information
How do we interpret ambiguous and unambiguous information in the context of systematic cognitive error?
- ambiguous information: perceive it in a way that fits our expectations
- unambiguous information: subject inconsistent information to more critical scrutiny than consistent information
How do systematic error play in scientific findings?
- scientists vigorously challenge and reinterpret unanticipated results while glossing over similar flaws and ambiguities in more comfortable findings
- safeguard: meaning of various outcomes precisely specified and objectively determined
What is the problem of multiple endpoint and variable window?
- our expectations can often be confirmed by any of a set of "multiple endpoints" and we allow window of opportunity to be sufficiently flexible to enable some beliefs to be confirmed
What is Barnum effect and explanation?
- tendency for people to give high accuracy rating on the description of their personality that is supposedly tailored to them that are in fact vague and describe a wide range of people
- in multi-faceted description, there is bound to be sme overlap in the characteristics, and the statements are so general that they are bound to ring true
Do people tend to selectively recall success or failure? And what differentiates between one-sided and two sided events?
- depends on the sidedness of the events: one-sided event (More success), two-sided events (both outcomes)
- confirmations and non-confirmations (one-sided events which confirms a person's expectations are better remebered compared with non-events)
- focused vs unfocused expectations (in focused condition, people recall confirmatory and disconfirmatory events equally well whereas in unfocused condition, people recall three times as many of the confirmatory events)
- outcome assymetryies and one-sided events (hedonic assymetries, pattern assymetries, definitional assymetries, base-rate departure)
What is negatively eventful actions?
- actions and customs that are so common and automatic that we only become aware of them when someone fails to honor them
- a characteristic one-sided events where outcome is perceived as an event only when it comes out one way