Gilovich's Misconceptions

First Gilovich talks about The Misperception and Misinterpretation of Random Data. He opens this chapter with a quote by Francis Bacon. "We are predisposed to see order, pattern, and meaning in the world, and we find randomness, chaos, and meaninglessness unsatisfying (pg.9)". When looking at how people react to chaos in life, it is noticeable that we do find it unsatisfying. Most people will get stressed out, and when people get stressed they just give up. Most people (including myself) like to see order in our everyday lives. It makes people feel better knowing that they have a schedule to follow throughout the day, or that they have all their plan for the day listed out. This creates less chaos for people and it gives them a sense of relief.

Third, he writes about seeing what we expect to see. Information consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is generally accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Beliefs are much less responsive than they should be to the implications of new information. This is a sane and necessary strategy. "If a belief has a lifetime of support, it is perfectly valid to be skeptical of evidence that contradicts it"(Graham King). People need to be wary of the beliefs that don not have a solid foundation. For example, cultural stereotypes, social norms, and traditions. Ambiguous information is usually perceived in a way that fits our expectations. Some people may not be aware of the ambiguity. An example of ambiguous would be gambling, people tend to attribute their losses to outside forces, by their wins to themselves. By carefully scrutinizing information that does not fir people 's beliefs, we can usually find a way of either discounting or re-interpreting it. Multiple endpoints is not precisely specifying an expected outcome, people can pick any one and claim it as success. An example of this would be psychics because they will use very vague descriptions, so that people can apply them to their lives and perceive them as true. As he continues this chapter, he writes about multi-faceted expectation and how "two sufficiently complex entities, people can produce a mapping of one onto the other that will produce a certain amount of overlap, and allows us to claim they are similar in some way"