Intelligence Analysis Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations (2011) / Chapter Skim
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6 Individual Reasoning--Barbara A. Spellman
6 Individual Reasoning--Barbara A. Spellman
Pages 117-142
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From page 117... ...
This chapter first describes a prominent historical characterization of overall individual human reasoning -- that reasoning is filled with "irrationalities." The chapter then remarks on more recent characterizations of reasoning that try to uncover the judgment mechanisms that produce these irrationalities, including recognizing that human reasoning might best be thought of as involving both unconscious and conscious components that have different strengths and weaknesses. Finally, it describes two important characteristics of reasoning abilities: that people seek coherence, and that people are particularists (i.e., that we tend to emphasize the uniqueness of each situation)
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From page 118... ...
classic work, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, was an attempt to interpret those findings with respect to the intelligence analyst. Among the better known irrationalities are the availability and representativeness heuristics and the hindsight and overconfidence biases (all discussed below)
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From page 119... ...
A common and important type of attribute substitution is the use of the "inside view" -- that when asked to make judgments about various qualities, we query our own phenomenological experiences, or run our own mental simulations of events, and provide that as the "answer." Imagining versus doing Consider this oft-told story by the Nobel-prize winning psychologist Danny Kahneman.3 (It is an example of the "Planning Fallacy.") Kahneman was part of a group trying to develop a high school 2 It is easy to think of the eight countries beginning with I: Iraq, Iran, India, and Israel are related to current U.S.
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However, if you have previously seen the answer, the informativeness of your subjective difficulty is ruined. In the study, those who had earlier seen the answer in a list of words (but didn't necessarily remember seeing it)
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and actuality typically go awry when the factors affecting the judgment are different from the factors affecting the reality. To make predictions about the likelihood of an event, we typically use the "inside view" -- we run mental simulations and try to think of scenarios that will, or will not, lead to the predicted outcome.
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. Thus, the research described herein is likely to characterize the reasoning of analysts themselves, but it might not characterize individuals from the various populations that analysts may consider.
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So, for example, in the classic irrationality findings in which System 1 makes an attribute substitution (e.g., substituting ease of retrieval for systematic counting) , System 2 can slow things down to reach the correct answer (e.g., in the United Nations example above)
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From page 124... ...
" the answers are affected by the weather at the time -- when the weather is better, people report being happier. However, if the researchers preface the happiness question with a seemingly banal question about the weather, the weather -- an irrelevant factor -- no longer affects mood judgments; that is, people eliminate its influence (Schwarz and Clore, 1983)
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From page 125... ...
People Seek Patterns People are adept at finding patterns in the world, even when such patterns are not "real." These days we look up at the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor9 and wonder, what were second-century astronomers thinking? Did they really see bears in those patterns of stars?
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From page 126... ...
Suppose you are given a choice: You can take the advice of someone who has always said accurately in the past that five coins were behind door A or take the advice of someone who has been correct only 80 percent of the time in the past that seven coins are behind door B People vary on which they choose, but that is not what is at issue.10 Suppose you believe the person with the 80 percent accuracy rate is really trying to help you -- he or she does not benefit from your errors and apologizes when he or she cannot deliver.
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. But if information about source behavior is not effectively collected, collated, and provided, trying to discriminate deceptive from uncertain sources will be difficult.
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that two people with the same information -- be it a low-resolution satellite photograph or the incomplete facts surrounding a death -- can logically interpret it differently given different prior knowledge. People Seek Explanations and Causes From telling stories about the gods of Mount Olympus to examining the tiniest bits of matter, people try to make sense of the world by figuring out the causes of events.
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From page 129... ...
When people have a particular answer to a question or a particular hypothesis in mind, they may suffer from "confirmation bias." Much has been written about confirmation bias in the analysis literature and, indeed, many analytic tools have been developed to address different aspects of it. The term has been used to describe various flaws in reasoning that, although often lumped together, are distinct.
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From page 130... ...
In addition, anecdotal evidence from analysts suggests that more highly classified information may be treated as more valuable information -- despite not necessarily being either more relevant or reliable. (This effect sounds like an attribute substitution effect.)
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Worse yet, by articulating some reasons, they may overweight those reasons and lose access to other reasons. The examples of how asking about dating or the weather first influences subsequent judgments of happiness described earlier illustrate how thinking about some reasons causes overweighting of those reasons.
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From page 132... ...
When people reason they usually have one of two goals: one is to try to find the most accurate answer, and the other is to find a particular answer. The goal will affect the reasoning strategies chosen; the strategies chosen will affect what is concluded (see Kunda, 1990, for an excellent description of the strategies and processes involved)
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Jones, who decides to take the scenic route home from work one day, brakes hard to stop at a yellow light, and is hit by a drunk driver. When asked to change the story so that the outcome would be different, most people suggest not taking the unusual route, or not braking at the light, or the driver not being drunk.
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Tversky argued that people knew more about the former countries than the latter countries. When asked about similarity, they weighted the similar features more; when asked about differences, they weighted the different features more -- thus resulting in the seemingly contradictory answers.
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For example, experiment participants were told that each year in the United States, about 2 million people die. Some were asked to estimate the probability of people dying from "natural causes"; the average was 58 percent.
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The situation in Iraq in 2003 did not provide a good analogy to World War II and Persian Gulf War II did not garner the public and international support of Persian Gulf War I What makes a good analogy?
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Experts' Use of Analogy When using analogies, experts are better at ignoring superficial similarities and using structural similarities; indeed, part of developing expertise is learning about the important underlying structures of information. For example, novice and expert physicists were given cards with illustrations of physics problems and asked to sort them.
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From page 138... ...
It is well documented that experts in a variety of fields rely too much on what they see as special circumstances of the present case rather than relying on the common features of a case.22 Especially important in the context of analysis, there may be a reward structure in place that values characterizing current situations as different from past ones. For example, an expert might "get credit" for expertise when pointing out how a new situation is different from the past rather than saying, as any non-expert could, that it is the same as the past.
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1984. Assessment of covariation by humans and animals: The joint influence of prior expectations and current situational information.
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1996. Adult egocentrism: Subjective experience versus analytic bases for judgment.
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American Political Science Review 95(4)
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