Wikipedia gets bad press. From day one at university we were told, in no uncertain terms, that it is the devil's source and should not be used in any academic work. Consequently, when you tell someone that you found your information (whether that be about how many goals Liam Fox scored for Livingston or the names of the Queen's corgis) on Wikipedia, they scoff. Granted, I'm sure that, overall, Wikipedia comes quite short of being 100% accurate, but you would be lying if you said you don't use it at least a hand-full of times a week.
Once you get past the prejudice against the great online encyclopedia, you can start to enjoy it. Away from the likes of BuzzFeed and Facebook, there is a world of knowledge out there waiting to fill the hours you should be using for other things - knowledge gathering procrastination, you might call it. Anyway, this morning I searched for something I've been meaning to for a while and found what I can comfortably term my favourite page on Wikipedia. Guess I should tell you about it then?
I am currently reading a book by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman called 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'. The guidance on the back of the book from a reviewer is to "Buy it fast. Read it slowly. It will change the way you think!" I bought it about a year ago as quickly as Amazon would allow and I've been reading it slowly ever since - never say that I am anything but obedient. Even having not finished the book (I'm still only about 1/3 of the way through it!) I can safely say that it is one of my favourite books ever. I'll give you the gist of it before I get on with how this brought me to Wikipedia.
Kahneman and his colleague, the late Amos Tversky, posit that we think in two ways - fast and slow. System 1 is the 'fast' system which operates without us having to think. If I say 2 x 2 to you, hopefully you think 4 without having to do the sum. However, if I say 24 x 33 you can't give the answer straight away and your System 2 has to kick in. This simple illustration presents itself in everything we do.
However, System 1, despite always switched on, operates using a number of cognitive biases which allow it to work so quickly. Because I haven't finished the book I've not discovered all of the experiments and tests which have been run to identify these biases, but I have 'skipped to the end' in that I searched for cognitive biases on Wikipedia. And so I found my favorite page. To be honest, I haven't read though the whole list but for the purposes of this post I have picked out a few favourites to outline below and look at how they present themselves. I could spend hours reading the list and the pages which stem from it, and I'm sure some of you will want to as well after reading this post.
I'll start with a meaty one. My understanding here is that our beliefs are tied closely to what we are able to recall with the most immediacy. So, for example, over the last couple of months people will have been more aware of the safety of air travel as a result of what happened in Asia because it is easy to recall. However, at the moment people are less concerned about terrorism than they were a few years ago because it is not on the news just now. It therefore comes down to what information is most readily available to us and how we conduct ourselves on that basis.
The interesting thing to think about here, going back to the 'fast/slow' distinction discussed above, is that our immediate reaction to a situation is informed, not by statistics or probabilities, but by what our intuition tells us - i.e. the fast, knee-jerk System 1. On the other hand, if you look at the MH-370 tragedy in the context of flight travel more generally- something that requires System 2 to be engaged - then we see that that mode of transport is as safe as it was prior to that event.
To put this in different terms, the influence that the media has on how we conduct ourselves is possibly more than we can begin to fathom. Hence why you probably shouldn't read the Daily Mail or the Sun - amongst other, more obvious reasons of course!
I openly admit to enjoying Saturday night TV - Britain's Got Talent started again at the weekend and I couldn't be happier. For those of you who have watched the likes of BGT and X Factor, you will know the person I'm about to describe. This person is very passionate. They are confident in their ability. They walk on to the stage with with the air of someone who looks like they were born to be there. They tell the judges that they want to be as big as Beyonce or Mick Jagger. Then they open their mouths. Awful.
The Dunning-Kreuger effect describes this situation - and, indeed, its converse. People who think they are competent in something cannot see that they are incompetent because they are unable to see past their belief that they are really good. Have you ever sung in the shower and been told after that you sounded awful, even though you thought you sounded great? Same thing.
What's the converse though? Well the same thing happens in your head when you are competent at something but you can't see that yourself. I've fallen foul to this many times in the past. Any time I do something very good, I always think that everyone else should be able to do it as well, thus making me blind to my own competence. This might help explain why I'm always so hard on myself about things?
Finally on this, I just noticed in the actual Wiki page for this bias that there is a quote from a Shakespeare play (As You Like It) which encapsulates this well - couldn't help myself but include it here:
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
I'll try and fire through these a bit quicker now. The Forer effect (or 'Barnum effect') presents itself with a simple example. People (thankfully not people I know very well) take their horoscopes very seriously. The thing is that if you ever read them objectively then you will see that any of them could apply to anyone at any time. When you read a horoscope you fit what you read to whatever (often tenuously) fits with it in your own life. The same applies to those things which tell you your personality on the basis of your name. Apparently I do not "suffer fools gladly" - I don't know anyone who does. Here are a few other generic statements which are apparently tied to my name which I found on this website:
"Generally you are good-natured, though at times you can be rather blunt and sarcastic."
"Your spirits are buoyed up greatly by encouragement and appreciation."
"You are inclined to pursue good times and emotional indulgences to excess."
Generic rubbish.
This is a really big one. It is the reaction that everyone with a smart phone has to not being able to remember something: Google it. The result is that younger people tend not to be able to recall facts which can be accessed instantly online. Indeed, younger people will have learned a lot less hard facts because they always have them at their finger-tips.
This has been evidenced a number of times over the last few years with my family. Almost every time I visit relatives we have that age-old session of trying to remember something, such as a celebrity's name, the name of a street or the place that someone had a day trip to fifty years ago. Instead of sitting around for ages trying to find this piece of knowledge using System 2, my System 1 gets me to pull my phone out of my pocket and find out in ten seconds. It somewhat blunts certain conversations but we are an impatient generation.
See also the concept of 'popcorn brain' on this note.
I've decided to finish on one that I can attach a message to which is relevant to this time of the academic year - don't say I'm not good to you! Rosy retrospection is when you remember things to be better than they actually were. This suggests why when we come back to something that we remember enjoying, we are often disappointing - 'this is not as good as I remember it'. Childhood memories are grounded in this.
How does this link to exams though? I believe that our perceptions of how we approach revision and exams is based on what has gone before. However, we have to remember that what went before now has an outcome, in the form of a grade. When we think about our past experiences more closely we will remember that it was just as hard back then as it is now.
For example, at Christmas I had a single 6000 word essay to write compared to a year earlier when I had three of them. I couldn't fathom why I was finding it so difficult this year after getting through three the year before. However, when I think about that experience more closely, I remember some dark days and thinking I wasn't going to get them done. System 1 recalls only that I submitted them on time and that I did reasonably well in them - I remember it as a 'rosy' experience, particular compared to how I feel facing a similar experience in the present.
So when you are preparing for your exams and you start to second-guess yourself and question why last year felt like it was easier, it wasn't. It is merely you recalling the good things about the exams - mostly the fact that they are done now - without recalling all of the struggle that got you to that point. Don't fall into that trap, as tempting and natural as that might be.
Well that was a longer post that I had anticipated writing but I enjoyed myself, and I hope you have as well. I am constantly fascinated about the way that we think and how the mind works and have a real enthusiasm for continuing this as a hobby for a long time to come. To many of you it might be boring and overly analytical but having started looking at this stuff I now can't help myself. I would call it the 'curse of knowledge' while others would call it bollocks - you decide.
Cheers,
Martin
