Thinking, Fast and Slow (13 page)

Cause and Chance

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is—chance selected it from among its alternatives.

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events. For an example, take the sex of six babies born in sequence at a hospital. The sequence of boys and girls is obviously random; the events are independent of each other, and the number of boys and girls who were born in the hospital in the last few hours has no effect whatsoever on the sex of the next baby. Now consider three possible sequences:

BBBGGG

GGGGGG

BGBBGB

Are the sequences equally likely? The intuitive answer—“of course not!”—is false. Because the events are independent and because the outcomes B and G are (approximately) equally likely, then any possible sequence of six births is as likely as any other. Even now that you know this conclusion is true, it remains counterintuitive, because only the third sequence appears random. As expected, BGBBGB is judged much more likely than the other two sequences. We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all. You can see why assuming causality could have had evolutionary advantages. It is part of the general vigilance that we have inherited from ancestors. We are automatically on the lookout for the possibility that the environment has changed. Lions may appear on the plain at random times, but it would be safer to notice and respond to an apparent increase in the rate of appearance of prides of lions, even if it is actually due to the fluctuations of a random process.

The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences. In our article on representativeness, Amos and I cited the statistician William Feller, who illustrated the ease with which people see patterns where none exists. During the intensive rocket bombing of London in World War II, it was generally believed that the bombing could not be random because a map of the hits revealed conspicuous gaps. Some suspected that German spies were located in the unharmed areas. A careful statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of hits was typical of a random process—and typical as well in evoking a strong impression that it was not random. “To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.”

I soon had an occasion to apply what I had learned frpeaрrainom Feller. The Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, and my only significant contribution to the war effort was to advise high officers in the Israeli Air Force to stop an investigation. The air war initially went quite badly for Israel, because of the unexpectedly good performance of Egyptian ground-to-air missiles. Losses were high, and they appeared to be unevenly distributed. I was told of two squadrons flying from the same base, one of which had lost four planes while the other had lost none. An inquiry was initiated in the hope of learning what it was that the unfortunate squadron was doing wrong. There was no prior reason to believe that one of the squadrons was more effective than the other, and no operational differences were found, but of course the lives of the pilots differed in many random ways, including, as I recall, how often they went home between missions and something about the conduct of debriefings. My advice was that the command should accept that the different outcomes were due to blind luck, and that the interviewing of the pilots should stop. I reasoned that luck was the most likely answer, that a random search for a nonobvious cause was hopeless, and that in the meantime the pilots in the squadron that had sustained losses did not need the extra burden of being made to feel that they and their dead friends were at fault.

Some years later, Amos and his students Tom Gilovich and Robert Vallone caused a stir with their study of misperceptions of randomness in basketball. The “fact” that players occasionally acquire a hot hand is generally accepted by players, coaches, and fans. The inference is irresistible: a player sinks three or four baskets in a row and you cannot help forming the causal judgment that this player is now hot, with a temporarily increased propensity to score. Players on both teams adapt to this judgment—teammates are more likely to pass to the hot scorer and the defense is more likely to doubleteam. Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball, either in shooting from the field or scoring from the foul line. Of course, some players are more accurate than others, but the sequence of successes and missed shots satisfies all tests of randomness. The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness. The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.

The public reaction to this research is part of the story. The finding was picked up by the press because of its surprising conclusion, and the general response was disbelief. When the celebrated coach of the Boston Celtics, Red Auerbach, heard of Gilovich and his study, he responded, “Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn’t care less.” The tendency to see patterns in randomness is overwhelming—certainly more impressive than a guy making a study.

The illusion of pattern affects our lives in many ways off the basketball court. How many good years should you wait before concluding that an investment adviser is unusually skilled? How many successful acquisitions should be needed for a board of directors to believe that the CEO has extraordinary flair for such deals? The simple answer to these questions is that if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

I began this chapter with the example of cancer incidence across the United States. The example appears in a book intended for statistics teachers, but I learned about it from an amusing article by the two statisticians I quoted earlier, Howard Wainer and Harris Zwerling. Their essay focused on a large iiveрothersnvestment, some $1.7 billion, which the Gates Foundation made to follow up intriguing findings on the characteristics of the most successful schools. Many researchers have sought the secret of successful education by identifying the most successful schools in the hope of discovering what distinguishes them from others. One of the conclusions of this research is that the most successful schools, on average, are small. In a survey of 1,662 schools in Pennsylvania, for instance, 6 of the top 50 were small, which is an overrepresentation by a factor of 4. These data encouraged the Gates Foundation to make a substantial investment in the creation of small schools, sometimes by splitting large schools into smaller units. At least half a dozen other prominent institutions, such as the Annenberg Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust, joined the effort, as did the U.S. Department of Education’s Smaller Learning Communities Program.

This probably makes intuitive sense to you. It is easy to construct a causal story that explains how small schools are able to provide superior education and thus produce high-achieving scholars by giving them more personal attention and encouragement than they could get in larger schools. Unfortunately, the causal analysis is pointless because the facts are wrong. If the statisticians who reported to the Gates Foundation had asked about the characteristics of the worst schools, they would have found that bad schools also tend to be smaller than average. The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable. If anything, say Wainer and Zwerling, large schools tend to produce better results, especially in higher grades where a variety of curricular options is valuable.

Thanks to recent advances in cognitive psychology, we can now see clearly what Amos and I could only glimpse: the law of small numbers is part of two larger stories about the workings of the mind.

• The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.
  
• Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.
  

Speaking of the Law of Small Numbers

Amos and I once rigged a wheel of fortune. It was marked from 0 to 100, but we had it built so that it would stop only at 10 or 65. We recruited students of the University of Oregon as participants in our experiment. One of us would stand in front of a small group, spin the wheel, and ask them to write down the number on which the wheel stopped, which of course was either 10 or 65. We then asked them two questions:

The spin of a wheel of fortune—even one that is not rigged—cannot possibly yield useful information about anything, and the participants in our experiment should simply have ignored it. But they did not ignore it. The average estimates of those who saw 10 and 65 were 25% and 45%, respectively.

The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an
anchoring effect
. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor. If you are asked whether Gandhi was more than 114 years old when he died you will end up with a much higher estimate of his age at death than you would if the anchoring question referred to death at 35. If you consider how much you should pay for a house, you will be influenced by the asking price. The same house will appear more valuable if its listing price is high than if it is low, even if you are determined to resist the influence of this number; and so on—the list of anchoring effects is endless. Any number that you are asked to consider as a possible solution to an estimation problem will induce an anchoring effect.

We were not the first to observe the effects of anchors, but our experiment was the first demonstration of its absurdity: people’s judgments were influenced by an obviously uninformative number. There was no way to describe the anchoring effect of a wheel of fortune as reasonable. Amos and I published the experiment in our
Science
paper, and it is one of the best known of the findings we reported there.

There was only one trouble: Amos and I did not fully agree on the psychology of the anchoring effect. He supported one interpretation, I liked another, and we never found a way to settle the argument. The problem was finally solved decades later by the efforts of numerous investigators. It is now clear that Amos and I were both right. Two different mechanisms produce anchoring effects—one for each system. There is a form of anchoring that occurs in a deliberate process of adjustment, an operation of System 2. And there is anchoring that occurs by a priming effect, an automatic manifestation of System 1.

Anchoring as Adjustment

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally “moving” from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther. Decades after our disagreement, and years after Amos’s death, convincing evidence of such a process was offered independently by two psychologists who had worked closely with Amos early in their careers: Eldar Shafir and Tom Gilovich together with their own students—Amos’s intellectual grandchildren!

To get the idea, take a sheet of paper and draw a 2½-inch line going up, starting at the bottom of the page—without a ruler. Now take another sheet, and start at the top and draw a line going down until it is 2½ inches from the bottom. Compare the lines. There is a good chance that your first estimate of 2½ inches was shorter than the second. The reason is that you do not know exactly what such a line looks like; there is a range of uncertainty. You stop near the bottom of the region of uncertainty when you start from the bottom of the page and near the top of the region when you start from the top. Robyn Le Boeuf and Shafir found many examples of that mechanism in daily experience. Insufficient adjustment neatly explains why you are likely to drive too fast when you come off the highway onto city streets—especially if you are talking with someone as you drive. Insufficient adjustment is also a source of tension between exasperated parents and teenagers who enjoy loud music in their room. Le Boeuf and Shafir note that a “well-intentioned child who turns down exceptionally loud music to meet a parent’s demand that it be played at a ‘reasonable’ volume may fail to adjust sufficiently from a high anchor, and may feel that genuine attempts at compromise are being overlooked.” The driver and the child both deliberately adjust down, and both fail to adjust enough.

Now consider these questions:

The first thing that happens when you consider each of these questions is that an anchor comes to your mind, and you know both that it is wrong and the direction of the correct answer. You know immediately that George Washington became president after 1776, and you also know that the boiling temperature of water at the top of Mount Everest is lower than 100°C. You have to adjust in the appropriate direction by finding arguments to move away from the anchor. As in the case of the lines, you are likely to stop when you are no longer sure you should go farther—at the near edge of the region of uncertainty.

Nick Epley and Tom Gilovich found evidence that adjustment is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor: people who are instructed to shake their head when they hear the anchor, as if they rejected it, move farther from the anchor, and people who nod their head show enhanced anchoring. Epley and Gilovich also confirmed that adjustment is an effortful operation. People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with dighdth=igits or because they are slightly drunk. Insufficient adjustment is a failure of a weak or lazy System 2.

So we now know that Amos was right for at least some cases of anchoring, which involve a deliberate System 2 adjustment in a specified direction from an anchor.

Anchoring as Priming Effect

When Amos and I debated anchoring, I agreed that adjustment sometimes occurs, but I was uneasy. Adjustment is a deliberate and conscious activity, but in most cases of anchoring there is no corresponding subjective experience. Consider these two questions:

Did you produce your estimate by adjusting down from 144? Probably not, but the absurdly high number still affected your estimate. My hunch was that anchoring is a case of suggestion. This is the word we use when someone causes us to see, hear, or feel something by merely bringing it to mind. For example, the question “Do you now feel a slight numbness in your left leg?” always prompts quite a few people to report that their left leg does indeed feel a little strange.

Amos was more conservative than I was about hunches, and he correctly pointed out that appealing to suggestion did not help us understand anchoring, because we did not know how to explain suggestion. I had to agree that he was right, but I never became enthusiastic about the idea of insufficient adjustment as the sole cause of anchoring effects. We conducted many inconclusive experiments in an effort to understand anchoring, but we failed and eventually gave up the idea of writing more about it.

The puzzle that defeated us is now solved, because the concept of suggestion is no longer obscure: suggestion is a priming effect, which selectively evokes compatible evidence. You did not believe for a moment that Gandhi lived for 144 years, but your associative machinery surely generated an impression of a very ancient person. System 1 understands sentences by trying to make them true, and the selective activation of compatible thoughts produces a family of systematic errors that make us gullible and prone to believe too strongly whatever we believe. We can now see why Amos and I did not realize that there were two types of anchoring: the research techniques and theoretical ideas we needed did not yet exist. They were developed, much later, by other people. A process that resembles suggestion is indeed at work in many situations: System 1 tries its best to construct a world in which the anchor is the true number. This is one of the manifestations of associative coherence that I described in the first part of the book.

The German psychologists Thomas Mussweiler and Fritz Strack offered the most compelling demonstrations of the role of associative coherence in anchoring. In one experiment, they asked an anchoring question about temperature: “Is the annual mean temperature in Germany higher or lower than 20°C (68°F)?” or “Is the annual mean temperature in Germany higher or lower than 5°C (40°F)?”

All participants were then briefly shown words that they were asked to identify. The researchers found that 68°F made it easier to recognize summer words (like
sun
and
beach
), and 40°F facilitated winter words (like
frost
and
ski
). The selective activation of compatible memories explains anchoring: the high and the low numbers activate different sets of ideas in memory. The estimates of annual temperature draw on these biased samples of ideas and are therefore biased as well. In another elegant study in the same vein, participants were asked about the average price of German cars. A high anchor selectively primed the names of luxury brands (Mercedes, Audi), whereas the low anchor primed brands associated with mass-market cars (Volkswagen). We saw earlier that any prime will tend to evoke information that is compatible with it. Suggestion and anchoring are both explained by the same automatic operation of System 1. Although I did not know how to prove it at the time, my hunch about the link between anchoring and suggestion turned out to be correct.

The Anchoring Index

Many psychological phenomena can be demonstrated experimentally, but few can actually be measured. The effect of anchors is an exception. Anchoring can be measured, and it is an impressively large effect. Some visitors at the San Francisco Exploratorium were asked the following two questions:

The “high anchor” in this experiment was 1,200 feet. For other participants, the first question referred to a “low anchor” of 180 feet. The difference between the two anchors was 1,020 feet.

As expected, the two groups produced very different mean estimates: 844 and 282 feet. The difference between them was 562 feet. The anchoring index is simply the ratio of the two differences (562/1,020) expressed as a percentage: 55%. The anchoring measure would be 100% for people who slavishly adopt the anchor as an estimate, and zero for people who are able to ignore the anchor altogether. The value of 55% that was observed in this example is typical. Similar values have been observed in numerous other problems.

The anchoring effect is not a laboratory curiosity; it can be just as strong in the real world. In an experiment conducted some years ago, real-estate agents were given an opportunity to assess the value of a house that was actually on the market. They visited the house and studied a comprehensive booklet of information that included an asking price. Half the agents saw an asking price that was substantially higher than the listed price of the house; the other half saw an asking price that was substantially lower. Each agent gave her opinion about a reasonable buying price for the house and the lowest price at which she would agree to sell the house if she owned it. The agents were then asked about the factors that had affected their judgment. Remarkably, the asking price was not one of these factors; the agents took pride in their ability to ignore it. They insisted that the listing price had no effect on their responses, but they were wrong: the anchoring effect was 41%. Indeed, the professionals were almost as susceptible to anchoring effects as business school students with no real-estate experience, whose anchoring index was 48%. The only difference between the two groups was that the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence.

Powerful anchoring effects are found in decisions that people make about money, such as when they choose how much to contribute al.ls denied to a cause. To demonstrate this effect, we told participants in the Exploratorium study about the environmental damage caused by oil tankers in the Pacific Ocean and asked about their willingness to make an annual contribution “to save 50,000 offshore Pacific Coast seabirds from small offshore oil spills, until ways are found to prevent spills or require tanker owners to pay for the operation.” This question requires intensity matching: the respondents are asked, in effect, to find the dollar amount of a contribution that matches the intensity of their feelings about the plight of the seabirds. Some of the visitors were first asked an anchoring question, such as, “Would you be willing to pay $5…,” before the point-blank question of how much they would contribute.

When no anchor was mentioned, the visitors at the Exploratorium—generally an environmentally sensitive crowd—said they were willing to pay $64, on average. When the anchoring amount was only $5, contributions averaged $20. When the anchor was a rather extravagant $400, the willingness to pay rose to an average of $143.