Fabrice Grinda

Musings of an Entrepreneur

You are not as rational as you think you are!

There is more and more evidence that random factors can influence our decisions. Read this fantastic post by my friend Auren Hoffman on the topic: People are Highly Susceptible to Suggestion

July 18th 2008 Posted to Interesting Articles

* Comments (3)

Comments

  1. Patrik
    July 18th, 2008 | 1:24 pm

    Interesting article and while I largely agree — however, I think, as NNT would say, Jonathan Haidt has been fooled by randomness.

    Men named Lawrence and women named Laurie are more likely to become lawyers. Louis and Louise are more likely to move to Louisiana or St. Louis, and George and Georgina are more likely to move to Georgia.

    See Russell Roberts’ thoughts on a recent study where psychologists find that having the initial “K” increases your chance of striking out when playing professional baseball.

  2. Pieter
    July 19th, 2008 | 6:54 am

    Try having a look at the book “Predictable Irrationality” by Dan Ariely if you haven’t already. Great stuff. We are sheep.

  3. q
    July 20th, 2008 | 5:28 pm

    I am quite confident people’s opinions are shaped by various factors. However, I am very skeptical of this research. If not done very carefully the conclusions will be garbage: a search through a large statistics space would produce things that looked statistically significant but are not.

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