Thomas Gilovich

The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences

We investigate the origin and the validity of common beliefs regarding “the hot hand” and “streak shooting” in the game of basketball. Basketball players and fans alike tend to believe that a player’s chance of hitting a shot are greater following a hit than following a miss on the previous shot. However, detailed analyses of the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers provided no evidence for a positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. The same conclusions emerged from free-throw records of the Boston Celtics, and from a controlled shooting experiment with the men and women of Cornell’s varsity teams. The outcomes of previous shots influenced Cornell players’ predictions but not their performance. The belief in the hot hand and the “detection” of streaks in random sequences is attributed to a general misconception of chance according to which even short random sequences are thought to be highly representative of their generating process.

The experience of regret: What, when, and why

This article reviews evidence indicating that there is a temporal pattern to the experience of regret. Actions, or errors of commission, generate more regret in the short term; but inactions, or errors of omission, produce more regret in the long run. The authors contend that this temporal pattern is multiply determined, and present a framework to organize the divergent causal mechanisms that are responsible for it. In particular, this article documents the importance of psychological processes that (a) decrease the pain of regrettable action over time, (b) bolster the pain of regrettable inaction over time, and (c) differentially affect the cognitive availability of these two types of regrets. Both the functional and cultural origins of how people think about regret are discussed.

To Do or to Have? That Is the Question

Do experiences make people happier than material possessions? In two surveys, respondents from various demographic groups indicated that experiential purchases-those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience--made them happier than material purchases. In a follow-up laboratory experiment, participants experienced more positive feelings after pondering an experiential purchase than after pondering a material purchase. In another experiment, participants were more likely to anticipate that experiences would make them happier than material possessions after adopting a temporally distant, versus a temporally proximate, perspective. The discussion focuses on evidence that experiences make people happier because they are more open to positive reinterpretations, are a more meaningful part of ones identity, and contribute more to successful social relationships.

The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic Why the Adjustments Are Insufficient

One way to make judgments under uncertainty is to anchor on information that comes to mind and adjust until a plausible estimate is reached. This anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic is assumed to underlie many intuitive judgments, and insufficient adjustment is commonly invoked to explain judgmental biases. However, despite extensive research on anchoring effects, evidence for adjustment-based anchoring biases has only recently been provided, and the causes of insufficient adjustment remain unclear. This research was designed to identify the origins of insufficient adjustment. The results of two sets of experiments indicate that adjustments from self-generated anchor values tend to be insufficient because they terminate once a plausible value is reached (Studies 1a and 1b) unless one is able and willing to search for a more accurate estimate (Studies 2a-2c).

Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others.

Important asymmetries between self-perception and social perception arise from the simple fact that other peoples actions, judgments, and priorities sometimes differ from ones own. This leads people not only to make more dispositional inferences about others than about themselves (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1972) but also to see others as more susceptible to a host of cognitive and motivational biases. Although this blind spot regarding ones own biases may serve familiar self-enhancement motives, it is also a product of the phenomenological stance of naive realism. It is exacerbated, furthermore, by peoples tendency to attach greater credence to their own introspections about potential influences on judgment and behavior than they attach to similar introspections by others. The authors review evidence, new and old, of this asymmetry and its underlying causes and discuss its relation to other psychological phenomena and to interpersonal and intergroup conflict.

The evolution of one-shot cooperation: An experiment

Abstract Can people rationally advance their own material interests by cooperating in one-shot prisoners dilemmas, even when there is no possibility of being punished for defection? We outline a model that describes how such cooperation could evolve if the presence of a cooperative disposition can be discerned by others. We test the models key assumption with an experiment in which we find that subjects who interacted for thirty minutes before playing one-shot prisoners dilemmas with two others were substantially more accurate than chance in predicting their partners decisions.

The temporal pattern to the experience of regret.

Through telephone surveys, written questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews, it was found that peoples biggest regrets tend to involve things they have failed to do in their lives. This conflicts with research on counterfactual thinking that indicates that people regret unfortunate outcomes that stem from actions taken more than identical outcomes that result from actions foregone. These divergent findings were reconciled by demonstrating that peoples regrets follow a systematic time course: Actions cause more pain in the short-term, but inactions are regretted more in the long run. Support for this contention was obtained in 2 scenario experiments that assessed peoples beliefs about the short- and long-term regrets of others and in an experiments that asked Ss about their own regrets of action and inaction from 2 time periods. Several mechanisms that can account for this temporal pattern are discussed.

The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One's Own Actions and Appearance

This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study 3, participants in a group discussion overestimated how prominent their positive and negative utterances were to their fellow discussants. Studies 4 and 5 provide evidence supporting an anchoring-and-adjustment interpretation of the spotlight effect. In particular, people appear to anchor on their own rich phenomenological experience and then adjust--insufficiently--to take into account the perspective of others. The discussion focuses on the manifestations and implications of the spotlight effect across a host of everyday social phenomena.

Heuristics and Biases: Introduction – Heuristics and Biases: Then and Now

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of papers by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman revolutionized academic research on human judgment. The central idea of the “heuristics and biases” program – that judgment under uncertainty often rests on a limited number of simplifying heuristics rather than extensive algorithmic processing – soon spread beyond academic psychology, affecting theory and research across a range of disciplines including economics, law, medicine, and political science. The message was revolutionary in that it simultaneously questioned the descriptive adequacy of ideal models of judgment and offered a cognitive alternative that explained human error without invoking motivated irrationality. The initial papers and a variety of related work were collected in a 1982 volume, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). In the time since, research in the heuristics and biases tradition has prospered on a number of fronts, each represented by a section of the current volume. In this opening chapter, we wish to put the heuristics and biases approach in historical context and discuss some key issues that have been raised since the 1982 book appeared. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Any discussion of the modern history of research on everyday judgment must take note of the large shadow cast by the classical model of rational choice. The model has been applied most vigorously in the discipline of economics, but its considerable influence can be felt in all the behavioral and social sciences and in related policy fields such as law and medicine.

Motivated Reasoning and Performance on the was on Selection Task

People tend to approach agreeable propositions with a bias toward confirmation and disagreeable propositions with a bias toward disconfirmation. Because the appropriate strategy for solving the four-card Wason selection task is to seek disconfirmation, the authors predicted that people motivated to reject a task rule should be more likely to solve the task than those without such motivation. In two studies, participants who considered a Wason task rule that implied their own early death (Study 1) or the validity of a threatening stereotype (Study 2) vastly outperformed participants who considered nonthreatening or agreeable rules. Discussion focuses on how a skeptical mindset may help people avoid confirmation bias both in the context of the Wason task and in everyday reasoning.