Thomas Gilovich Quotes

When we do cross paths with people whose beliefs and attitudes conflict with our own, we are rarely challenged.

the early 1980s, the A&W fast-food restaurant chain introduced a burger with a third of a pound of beef to compete with McDonald's popular quarter pounder. Although most customers preferred A&W's new burger in taste tests, it was a big disappointment in the marketplace. When focus groups were run to get to the bottom of this paradox, A&W discovered that many customers thought a burger with one-third of a pound of beef was less generous than one with one-quarter of a pound. Customers were attending to the denominator, just not very intelligently: The smaller "3" led many to conclude that one-third is smaller than one-quarter!21

When we prefer to believe something, we may approach the relevant evidence by asking ourselves,"what evidence is there to support this belief?" ... Note that this question is not unbiased: It directs our attention to supportive evidence and away from information that might contradict the desired conclusion. Because it is almost always possible to uncover some supportive evidence, the asymmetrical way we frame the question makes us overly likely to become convinced of what we hope to be true.

We believe certain things because they ought to be true.

People are often unaware of their own unawareness

We hold many dubious beliefs, in other words, not because they satisfy some important psychological need, but because they seem to be the most sensible conclusions consistent with the available evidence. People hold such beliefs because they seem, in the words of Robert Merton, to be the "irresistible products of their own experience."7 They are the products, not of irrationality, but of flawed rationality.

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe

We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves by declaring that these others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things "as they really are" and to react to them "in a normal way." We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways. (Ichheiser, 1949, p. 39)

How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data.

It seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked

We may be particularly inclined to acquire and retain beliefs that make us feel good.

Often when we get to know someone whose words and deeds were off-putting, once we get a better sense of how that person is understanding events, our dislike dissipates.

Note that the best rationalizations are those that have an element of truth. Whether you vote or not will almost certainly have no influence on the outcome of an election. Nor will the amount of carbon you personally put into the atmosphere make a difference in the fate of the planet. And perhaps it really should be up to governments rather than the charities that are soliciting your contributions to feed the hungry and homeless in America or save children around the world from crushing poverty and abuse. But the fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior.

This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil - an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions... [The] process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise.

We seek opinions that are likely to support what we want to be true.