Benford’s law is an amazing thing. If you know the probability distribution that classes of “natural” numbers should have, you can detect where people might be faking data: phony tax returns, bogus scientific studies, etc.
When estimating the cost of a bunch of purchases, a useful heuristic is rounding to the nearest dollar. (In fact, on US income tax returns, one is allowed to omit the cents). If prices were uniformly distributed, the following two heuristics would be equally accurate:
* Rounding each item up or down to the nearest dollar and summing
* Rounding each item down, summing, and adding a dollar for every two line items.
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Decision Science News is no stranger to misleading infographics in free New York newspapers. We could stop reading them entirely, but we find that playing “spot the infographic flaw” makes time fly on the subway.
Recently we saw the above graphic in a paper called Metro. Can you spot the goof?
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The journal Judgment and Decision Making today published the third special issue on “Recognition processes in inferential decision making (III)” edited by Julian N. Marewski, Rüdiger F. Pohl and Oliver Vitouch. All the articles address the recognition heuristic [Goldstein, D. G. & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90.]
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This week the reader is directed to Messy Matters to read up on research conducted by Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and Dan Goldstein in which they hunted for traces of “viral” diffusion on Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, and beyond. The results run counter to mainstream intuition.
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Decision Science News was recently at a cocktail party and mentioned that the percentage of articles in social psychology that employ deception can be as high as 80%.
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PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics should have sent their “packets” out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Educator’s Conference. Each year DSN reprints this sort of “what to expect while you’re applying” guide, first published here by Dan Goldstein in 2005.
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Best graph ever. LARGEST EVER DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 328 and 327 SPOTTED IN NEW YORK CITY
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DSN RUMINATES ABOUT INSURANCE WITH PETER MCGRAW This week, Decision Science News’ Dan Goldstein travels to Boulder, and teams up with Peter McGraw for a joint post (over grilled steak). — Enjoy Most people are happy to have a few types of insurance coverage, typically home, health, and life insurance. However, you can insure […]
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Last week, Decision Science News posted about a “no-decision diet” in which its editor followed, for one week and without exceptions, a healthy diet designed by someone else. Since then, a number of people have written in asking to have a look at the diet. If you were hoping to find out what the diet included, today is your lucky day.
