Thomas Gilovich

Las parejas estériles que adoptan un niño ¿tienen más posibilidades de concebir un hijo propio que las que no adoptan? Mucha gente cree que sí, pero no es cierto. ¿Nacen más niños cuando hay luna llena que el resto de los dias? Las enfermeras de salas de maternidad creen que si, pero tampoco es cierto. Las creencias erroneas abundan tanto entre los legos menos informados como entre los profesionales.En paises desarrollados con mas de un siglo de educacion general obligatoria hay mas gente que cree en la percepcion extrasensorial que en la evolucion. ¿Como pueden estar tan extendidas las creencias cuestionables, o demostradamente equivocadas? La evolucion nos ha dado herramientas intelectuales poderosas para procesar grandes cantidades de informacion con rapidez y exactitud.Pero el mundo no juega limpio. En lugar de proporcionarnos informacion clara, nos da datos desordenados, aleatorios, incompletos, no representativos, ambiguos, incoherentes, de percepcion dificil o que nos llegan de segunda mano. Los intentos fallidos de arreglarnoslas con estas dificultades dejan al descubierto nuestras carencias en el modo de sacar conclusiones y producen los hechos de los que estamos seguros, pero que no son ciertos.Este libro identifica los mecanismos que nos inducen al error. Y propone las estrategias necesarias para corregirlos, de modo que podamos pensar con claridad y desarrollar los habitos mentales que estimulan una vision del mundo mas exacta y menos vulnerable a la manipulacion interesada

Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life.When can we trust what we believethat "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their heuristics and biases approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their work highlighted the reflexive mental operations used to make complex problems manageable and illuminated how the same processes can lead to both accurate and dangerously flawed judgments. The heuristics and biases framework generated a torrent of influential research in psychology - research that reverberated widely and affected scholarship in economics, law, medicine, management, and political science. This book compiles the most influential research in the heuristics and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982 (by Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky). The various contributions develop and critically analyze the initial work on heuristics and biases, supplement these initial statements with emerging theory and empirical findings, and extend the research of the framework to new real-world applications.

Protect and grow your finances with help from this definitive and practical guide to behavioral economicsrevised and updated to reflect new economic realities.In their fascinating investigation of the ways we handle money, Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich reveal the psychological forcesthe patterns of thinking and decision makingbehind seemingly irrational behavior. They explain why so many otherwise savvy people make foolish financial choices: why investors are too quick to sell winning stocks and too slow to sell losing shares, why home sellers leave money on the table and home buyers dont get the biggest bang for their buck, why borrowers pay too much credit card interest and savers cant sock away as much as theyd like, and why so many of us cant control our spending. Focusing on the decisions we make every day, Belsky and Gilovich provide invaluable guidance for avoiding the financial faux pas that can cost thousands of dollars each year.Filled with fresh insight; practical advice; and lively, illustrative anecdotes, this book gives you the tools you need to harness the powerful science of behavioral economics in any financial environment.

Renowned psychologists describe the five most useful insights from social psychology that will help make you wise: wise about why we behave the way we do, and wise about how to use that knowledge to understand others and change ourselves for the better.When faced with a challenge, we often turn to those we trust for words of wisdom. Friends, relatives, and colleagues: someone with the best advice about how to boost sales, the most useful insights into raising children, or the sharpest take on a political issue. In The Wisest One in the Room, renowned social psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross ask: Why? What do these people know? What are the foundations of their wisdom? And, as professors and researchers who specialize in the study of human behavior, they wonder: What general principles of human psychology are they drawing on to reach these conclusions?They find that wisdom, unlike intelligence, demands some insight into peopletheir hopes, fears, passions, and drives. Its true for the executive running a Fortune 500 company, the candidate seeking public office, the artist trying to create work that will speak to the ages, or the single parent trying to get a child through the tumultuous adolescent years. To be wise, they discover, one must be psych-wise when dealing with everyday challenges.In The Wisest One in the Room Gilovich and Ross show that to answer any kind of behavioral question, it is essential to understand the detailsespecially the hidden and subtle detailsof the situational forces acting upon us. Understanding these forces is the key to becoming wiser in the way we understand the people and events we encounter, and wiser in the way we deal with the challenges that are sure to come our way. With the lessons gleaned here, you can learn the key to becoming the wisest one in the room.

When people get together, there is often one stand-out individual who others turn to for answers. This person has the best advice on everything from raising children to running a business, and offers the most penetrating insights into world events. Their understanding of people, and why we act as we do, makes them the wisest one in the room.Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross reveal their disciplines greatest discoveries so we can all become wiser. From conflict resolution to overcoming social shyness, and from winning a tennis match to encouraging people to recycle, they demonstrate how even small changes in social context, feedback or presentation can achieve dramatic results. Replete with real-world examples, The Wisest One in the Room is a fascinating examination of human behaviour, revealing how we can become more adept at tackling the challenges, great and small, that we face every day.