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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

January, 2012

Bad Psychology

People are better at predicting others' behavior than their own, due to overlooking the influence of circumstances.
Hardly shocking, but it turns out people are much better at predicting the behavior of others than themselves:
Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists.
It's interesting to think about what puts us in social-psychologist mode and whether we can switch that on for ourselves. Obviously it's not natural, but it's got to be possible, right? [Via Barking Up The Wrong Tree]
January 9, 2012
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.