World of Books

By   Todd William

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others.

But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

~ Clarence Day

The Power of Framing Questions

        By  Todd William


In the early 1980s cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky and his colleagues set out to study if the way a question was framed influenced the way people think.

They presented patients, medical students, and doctors with statistics about the effectiveness of surgery versus radiation therapy in treating cancer.

The participants were given information about effectiveness and survival rates and asked which treatment they would prefer, but framed with two different perspectives. Think about what you would choose as you read the statistics.

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CASE 1: Half the participants were provided the following data:

<> SURGERY: 90 percent of people who have undergone surgery survived the treatment, and 34 percent survived for at least five years afterward

<> RADIATION: 100 percent of people who have undergone radiation therapy survived the treatment, but only 22 percent who were still alive five years later

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CASE 2: The other half were given the same information, but framed in terms of mortality rather than survival. They were provided the following data:

<> SURGERY: 10 percent of people who have undergone surgery died during the surgery, and 66 percent died within five years

<> RADIATION: None of the people who have undergone radiation therapy died during treatment, and 78 percent died within five years

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The Result

You will notice that all patients were given the exact same set of statistics, just framed differently. The result had a remarkable effect on their decisions.

With the survival frame (Case 1), only 25 percent preferred radiation. When the possibility of dying during surgery was highlighted (Case 2), radiation therapy was chosen 42 percent of the time, even at the cost of deceased long-term survival.

What's more, even doctors with extensive training in these areas were as vulnerable to this framing bias and unable to judge based purely on the numbers.

If merely framing a question can influence a doctor's thought process even within his own domain, what does that mean for the rest of who merely hope to make rational choices?

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Source: The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
(Artwork by: Bill Sanderson)

The Motivation Problem ~ A Lesson in Cause & Effect on Israeli Fighter Pilots

By Todd Williams

(Artwork by: Tenjin Hidetaka)

In the 1960s, Nobel award winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman gave a lecture to a team of Israeli Air Force flight instructors about the value of positive reinforcement. Having proposed the idea that positive reinforcement almost always produced better results, the instructors scoffed at the idea. Their experience was completely the opposite confirmed by years of experience.

The instructors had tried being positive and it didn't work. When they used positive reinforcement the results actually got worse. After bad performances, when they used threats and normal military reprimands, the instructors found the pilots almost always improved the next day. Thus Kahneman's suggestion was the opposite of everything these instructors had experienced.

Illusions of Causality

You may be asking, who could even argue with such seemingly conclusive results? Yet Kahneman could, because he was right.

He showed that the actions of the instructors were not the cause of the expected results, and in fact, these actions weren’t the cause of anything. What the instructors were reporting was merely a case of regression toward the mean.

The fighter pilots were the very top in their fields, extremely dedicated and motivated, yet they were human like any of us so they were prone to good and bad days. On average, they performed very well. When one would have a bad day that would be below his norm, mere probability suggests that his next day is likely to be better. Conversely, when one performed well above his norm, the regression worked in the opposite direction as the probability would show that he would be expected to perform worse the next day.

The fact that the instructors yelled in their faces or praised their efforts had little to do with their next performance. The pilots simply had good and bad days from time to time. But positive feedback created considerably less stress than negative feedback, which was a powerful asset in an already stressful environment.

The beliefs of the instructors were completely fueled by a false assumption about cause and effect. We all want to assume we know the meaning of things, especially when it seems obvious. Yet often in life there is more depth than we notice.

As famed English writer Aldous Huxley observed...

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations."

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SOURCE: Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the Psychology of Prediction. Psychological Review, Vol. 80(No. 4). American Psychological Association, Inc.