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Insensitivity to Sample Size

The Disproportional Power of Anecdotes

Anecdotes tend to not be statistically significant, but their added emotional significance leads us to place additional weight on them. *** Humans, it seems, have an innate tendency to overgeneralize …

Continue readingThe Disproportional Power of Anecdotes

Promoting People In Organizations

In their 1978 paper Performance Sampling in Social Matches, researchers March and March discussed the implications of performance sampling for understanding careers in organizations. They came to some …

Continue readingPromoting People In Organizations

Predicting the Improbable

One natural human bias is that we tend to draw strong conclusions based on few observations. This bias, misconceptions of chance, shows itself in many ways including the gambler and hot hand …

Continue readingPredicting the Improbable

Choice Under Uncertainty

We use heuristics – rules of thumb – to make judgments. These can lead to certain predictable biases. These can lead to certain predictable biases. For instance, we classify situations …

Continue readingChoice Under Uncertainty

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