Stories and Subjectivity vs. Statistics and Objectivity Theme Analysis

Humans are natural storytellers; they attempt to make sense of the world by attaching stories to events that occur. Because of this, Kahneman explains, humans have a difficult time reckoning with purely statistical or numerical information and they underestimate the randomness in the world. One of the biggest difficulties that people face in making decisions or analyzing data is when they are presented with statistical information in conjunction with a narrative about the same principle. Even though the statistical information should hold as much weight—if not more—than the narrative, people generally prefer the narrative.

Humans will readily violate the laws of probability when they are presented with details that play into their impulse to automatically construct stories in their minds. After hearing priming details about a fictional person named Linda—including the facts that she is single, outspoken, concerned with discrimination and social justice—people said that it was more probable that Linda was a feminist bank teller than a bank teller, even though this violates the law of probability because any feminist bank teller is, by default, a bank teller (so simply saying “bank teller” would be the better guess). In another example, Kahneman describes a scenario: a cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. 85 percent of the cabs in the city are green and 15 percent are blue. A witness identified the cab as blue; witnesses under these circumstances correctly identify cab colors 80 percent of the time. What is the probability that the cab was green? Kahneman finds that people usually ignore the base rates of the number of cabs, and instead favor the witness’s accuracy, guessing about 80 percent. However, if the first sentence had said that green cabs are involved in 85 percent of accidents, people give more weight to that information because they construct a story assuming that the green cabs are more reckless. Thus, the narrative assumptions cloud the statistical information and make people less accurate.

People often place more weight in causality (the fact that an event directly leads to another event) because it helps them make sense of the world. However, this leads to errors in judgment because the world is often more random than people believe it to be. Kahneman worked with the Israeli Air Force, and he describes how one of the instructors emphasized punishment over reward. The instructor stated that when he praised flight cadets for a good maneuver, they usually did worse. Screaming into a cadet’s ear for bad execution generally led to better performance. However, this discredits the fact that a particularly good execution of a certain maneuver will more likely than not be followed by a less well-executed maneuver, and vice-versa with a particularly bad execution. Thus, while the instructor may appear to be correct, he is inappropriately attaching causality between his actions and the cadets’ performances. In general, people will assign greater significance to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck. Entire industries are built on expert analysts explaining what is often just due to laws of probability and chance. Kahneman points to analysis of the Olympic ski jump, in which athletes jump twice. If athletes have a good first jump, commentators say they will have a worse second jump because they will feel pressure; if athletes have a bad first jump, commentators say that they have nothing to lose and will have a better second jump. The analyst has detected a principle of luck and chance and has assigned a causal story to it. But Kahneman points out that, like the cadets, the athletes are simply more likely to have a worse jump if they had a better jump just prior, and vice versa.

The previous examples demonstrate how people lack objectivity when looking at statistics, but people also lack objectivity when they are forced to evaluate their own experiences. How an experience ends seems to hold greater weight in people’s memory than how it was as a whole. A record scratch at the end of an enjoyable concert “ruins” the experience. Even though the past is fixed, memory is mutable, and the story of how a person experienced the concert is changed in retrospect. Similarly, when people have a bad experience, the duration of that experience is less important than the memory of it. In an experiment, people are exposed to two experiences: first, sixty seconds of putting their hand in a cold water bath; second, sixty seconds of putting their hand in a cold water bath followed by thirty additional seconds with slightly less cold water. People prefer to repeat the second experience rather than the first, even though the second experience encompasses the first experience. Subjectively, people believe the second option is slightly less painful because it ends in a better way. This is another way in which people’s perceptions do not match statistical data and therefore cause them to act or respond in unexpected ways.

Constructing stories about the world is a useful way to make sense of it, but it also becomes one of the primary ways in which people commit errors in thinking and judgment. Using these examples, Kahneman tries to impress on his readers that things like intentions, talent, and stupidity only tell part of the story, and that luck and randomness should be just as critical in our understanding of how the world works.