23. George Smoot and Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 79–86.
24. Jonathan J. Koehler, “The Influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of Evidence Quality,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 56 (1993): 28–55.
25. See Koehler’s article for a discussion of this behavior from the Bayesian point of view.
26. Paul Samuelson, The Collected Papers of Paul Samuelson (Boston: MIT Press, 1986), 53. He was paraphrasing Max Planck, who said, “It is not that old theories are disproved, it is just that their supporters die out.” See Michael Szenberg and Lall Ramrattan, eds., New Frontiers in Economics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–4.
27. Susan L. Coyle, “Physician-Industry Relations. Part 1: Individual Physicians,” Annals of Internal Medicine 135, no. 5 (2002): 396–402.
28. Ibid.; Karl Hackenbrack and Mark W. Wilson, “Auditors’ Incentives and Their Application of Financial Accounting Standards,” Accounting Review 71, no. 1 (January 1996): 43–59; Robert A. Olsen, “Desirability Bias Among Professional Investment Managers: Some Evidence from Experts,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 10 (1997): 65–72; and Vaughan Bell et al., “Beliefs About Delusions,” Psychologist 16, no. 8 (August 2003): 418–23.
29. Drew Westen et al., “Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 11 (2006): 1947–58.
30. Ibid.
31. Peter H. Ditto and David F. Lopez, “Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Nonpreferred Conclusions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63, no. 4: 568–84.
32. Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science 306 (December 3, 2004): 1686, and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 169–70.
33. Charles G. Lord et al., “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 11 (1979): 2098–109.
34. Robert P. Vallone et al., “The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49, no. 3 (1985): 577–85.
35. Daniel L. Wann and Thomas J. Dolan, “Attributions of Highly Identified Sports Spectators,” Journal of Social Psychology 134, no. 6 (1994): 783–93, and Daniel L. Wann and Thomas J. Dolan, “Controllability and Stability in the Self-Serving Attributions of Sport Spectators,” Journal of Social Psychology 140, no. 2 (1998): 160–68.
36. Stephen E. Clapham and Charles R. Schwenk, “Self-Serving Attributions, Managerial Cognition, and Company Performance,” Strategic Management Journal 12 (1991): 219–29.
37. Ian R. Newby-Clark et al., “People Focus on Optimistic Scenarios and Disregard Pessimistic Scenarios While Predicting Task Completion Times,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 6, no. 3 (2000): 171–82.
38. David Dunning, “Strangers to Ourselves?” Psychologist 19, no. 10 (October 2006): 600–604; see also Dunning et al., “Flawed Self-Assessment.”
39. R. Buehler et al., “Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions,” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed. T. Gilovitch et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 251–70.
40. Eric Luis Uhlmann and Geoffrey L. Cohen, “Constructed Criteria,” Psychological Science 16, no. 6 (2005): 474–80.
41. Regarding all the experiments in this series, see Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein, “Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 109–26. See also Linda Babcock et al., “Biased Judgments of Fairness in Bargaining,” American Economic Review 85, no. 5 (1995): 1337–43, and the authors’ other related work cited in Babcock and Loewenstein.
42. Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health,” Psychological Bulletin 103, no. 2 (1988): 193–210.
43. David Dunning et al., “Self-Serving Prototypes of Social Categories,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61, no. 6 (1991): 957–68.
44. Harry P. Bahrick et al., “Accuracy and Distortion in Memory for High School Grades,” Psychological Science 7, no. 5 (September 1996): 265–71.
45. Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, 2005.
46. Stanley Meisler, “The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí,” Smithsonian Magazine (April 2005).
47. Taylor and Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being”; Alice M. Isen et al., “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, no. 6 (1987): 1122–31; and Peter J. D. Carnevale and Alice M. Isen, “The Influence of Positive Affect and Visual Access on the Discovery of Integrative Solutions in Bilateral Negotiations,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 37 (1986): 1–13.
48. Taylor and Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being,” and Dunning, “Strangers to Ourselves?”
49. Taylor and Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being.”
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
aboriginals
“above-average” effect
academic performance, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2
acetaminophen
acting, 5.1, 7.1
Adams, Marilyn J., 3.1, 3.2
Adolphs, Ralph
adrenaline
advertising, 1.1, 8.1, 8.2
affiliations, group
affiliative behavior, 4.1, 6.1, 8.1
affluence
African Americans, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 10.1
Agassiz, Louis
Alameda County, Calif.
Allport, Gordon, 7.1, 8.1
Amazon River
ambiguity, 10.1, 10.2
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Geophysical Union
American Medical Association (AMA)
American Meteorological Society
amnesia
amygdala, 4.1, 9.1
anger, 5.1, 5.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3
angina pectoris
animal characteristics, 1.1, 4.1, 4.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
animals, prl.1, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
see also specific animals
anterior cingulate cortex
Anthropologist on Mars, An (Sacks)
anthropology, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
anthropomorphization
anti-Semitism, 7.1, 7.2
Antony, Mark
anxiety, 4.1, 9.1
appearance, physical, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2
Apple Computer, 8.1, 8.2, 10.1
Arabs
archaeology
archetypes
Argentina
arithmetic
armies, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 10.2
arousal, sexual, 2.1, 9.1
art, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2
arteries, 7.1, 9.1