1. Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2. Bias blind spot – the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
3. Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
4. Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
5. Congruence bias – the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
6. Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
7. Déformation professionnelle – the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
8. Disconfirmation bias – the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
9. Endowment effect – the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
10. Focusing effect – prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
11. Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
12. Illusion of control – the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
13. Impact bias – the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
14. Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
15. Loss aversion – the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
16. Neglect of probability – the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
17. Mere exposure effect – the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
18. Omission bias – The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
19. Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
20. Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
21. Post-purchase rationalization – the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
22. Pseudocertainty effect – the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
23. Selective perception – the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
24. Status quo bias – the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
25. Von Restorff effect – the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
26. Zero-risk bias – preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

First was a map of national stereotypes based on Google searches for e.g. “what the English are known for“. [via Mike]

Not sure what “aristocratic kitchens” are – kitchens that the owners never enter? – and I really didn’t know the Swedes still carve Viking longboats at the weekend. Anyway, thought it was interesting as an emergent view of national stereotypes, and how easy it is to recognize rather than agree with them.

Second (and loosely connected) was a letter to the Times published last Friday title “Truth Exchange”. Commenting on an initiative between Agincourt and an English school, one Dr Kerry Bluglass of Warwick wrote

Not long ago, a charming French acquaintance of mine asked me, in all seriousness, about the British habit of naming landmarks after French victories.

“Which ones?”, I inquired.

“Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station,” he replied. I was completely unable to convince him of the true outcome of these battles, and I later discovered that this view is not unusual in France.”

Popular history, it would seem, might not written by the victors (be they French or British). It could be written by the group you’re in. And that’s a little terrifying.

It’s a horrible feeling, prejudice, however short-lived.

Unkind Crowds
Anil Dash has picked up on the poor treatment of David Hailey and says how there are

more and more examples of people just getting browbeaten by the blogosphere

Later on, in Anil talks about the value of perspective and notes that

Being too “in the trenches” on a topic seems to lead people into saying polarizing things, or into demeaning or dismissing those who disagree with them.

He’s spot on. I’m slightly suspicious of the way people invoke “the Wisdom of Crowds” in some of these sorts of conversations. (It seems increasingly to be in danger of being an “exception proves the rule”, blind faith type of comment. If you sit down and think about it, of course a rule’s being broken doesn’t prove it. Quite the opposite. And if you sit down and think about it, of course not all crowds are wise. Witch trials, apartheid, lemmings … and so on.) Anyway Surowiecki was at pains to point out that crowds seem only able to be wise when they are indepedent, decentralised, and diverse.

But what if the further you delve into the tail, the less likely you are to find ‘wise’ communities, communities that have these three features?

The stinging tail

There certainly seems to be some evidence of this – on and offline. Richard Evans Lee comments on Anil’s post that

Even before there was the web you saw this in usenet. Flame wars damaged many newsgroups usefulness long before spam became a problem. Before I quit reading newsgroups my kill filter became so heavily laden that I eventually switched to whitelisting people and deleted everything by the people not in the list. Which meant I’d miss any worthwhile new posters.

Newsgroups are essentially niche interests, and hey presto, you get uncivil behaviour. In April, Nick Gray and friends surveyed the New York Arts market. He posted a colleague’s thoughts on it all. It’s a wonderful read, but it was this that really caught my eye

One interesting facet of this [art] market segmentation … was that it seemed to get less intellectually haughty as we moved up the food chain. It struck me … that xxxxxxx xxxxxxx and others were openly disdainful of potential clients who would speculatively use art as aesthetic ornamentation to match their sofas … At Christie’s and the xxxxxxxxxx gallery, though, the suppliers seemed much more open to sell to any and all comers without questioning their motives …

the more financially successful consortiums were the ones that seemed to have the smallest ideological stake in their work.

As Anil might have put it, smaller groups are too “in the trenches”.

Daring to know
Alternatively, and as social scientists might have put it, we define who we are, as groups and as individuals by pointing to what we aren’t – the unclean, profane and taboo. I think (though I’m not sure) that the maths of this means that small groups see more that is unclean and taboo and wrong than large ones. It all puts a slightly less rosy spin on Chris Anderson’s recent article in Wired about the value of the tail. Anderson says that

“Everyone’s taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we’re drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them”

This notion of an ‘industry’ going for saccharin lowest common denominators sounds very much like the old Warner Bros chief’s quote from the ’50’s – “You can never underestimate the taste of the general public”. But what this idea of a sting in the tail might mean is that, rather than these industry (and mainstream) tendencies being snobbery, it is a push for an easy life. As soon as you overestimate, or try to engage with non-mainstream views, you are likely to run up against the sorts of ideologues found in the New York (and other) arts markets.

Kant and Foucault picked up on the notion of “daring to know”. On Anderson’s view, everyone “dares” sometime, and the more they do the more they like what they see. I think he’s confused what he thinks people ought to do with what they do do. I suspect people don’t dare enough – it’s hard and it’s risky, because there is a sting in the tail. As I posted a while ago, TV companies prefer Gulliver’s Travels as a happy two-part tale of little and large to a four-part story of a man’s possible insanity. As David Hailey commented after his poor treatment, he felt ’stained’ – you can almost add dirty, profane, and taboo. “Daring to know” and allowing for criticism is risky and I think many naturally avoid it. But it can reap rewards, for groups and individuals. The four-part Gulliver was a runaway success, and Hailey also admitted that the experience had allowed him to make his views and arguments more robust.

I’m dribbling on a bit, so I’ll cut it short:
- Crowds are only “wise” in specific cases – they need to be independent, decentralised and diverse.
- Small groups don’t fit this model.
- Small groups or at least groups that perceive themselves to be small, also tend to protect their identities vigourously/unpleasantly
- If you don’t engage with small groups, you (or your group) atrophy
- If you do, you (or your group) get stung.

I’m going to put the kettle on, but any solution to this bad behaviour Anil’s picked up on needs to address that little dilemma. I think …
There’s nothing like a cup of tea.