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364 Decision framing and cognitive inertia
this is because in the real world data are often unreliable and all data
may be (inappropriately) treated as such. Ayton and Wright 15 review the
evidence for the pervasiveness of conservatism in the revision of opinion.
One conclusion is that individuals are able to match their opinion
revision to a slow-changing environment but if environmental change is
fast (i.e. information received is highly diagnostic) then opinion change
lags behind. Such a lag typifies descriptions of strategic inertia in business
situations. Additionally, as we demonstrated in Chapter 9, Tversky
and Kahneman 16 identified a heuristic called anchoring and adjustment.
To recap, in one demonstration of this effect, people were asked to
estimate various quantities, stated in percentages (e.g. the percentage
of African countries in the United Nations). Before they make their
estimates, individuals were shown an arbitrary starting value between
0 and 100 given by the result of a spin of a wheel of fortune. Individuals
were required to indicate whether they considered this value too high
or too low and then give their own estimate. Reward for accuracy did
not reduce the anchoring and insufficient adjustment effect. Recently,
Bolger and Harvey 17 found strong evidence for the generality of the
anchor-and-adjust heuristic in judgmental forecasting.
Evans 18 reviewed another bias in judgment which is termed the
‘confirmation bias’. This refers to people’s tendency to test hypothesis
in a manner which is more likely to minimize rather than maximize
the chances of falsification. For example, the four-card selection task
illustrates this. 19 In this procedure, an individual is told a rule such as
‘If a card has a D on one side then it has a 4 on the other side’. He/she
is then shown four cards lying on a table, which display on their facing
sides the following symbols:
D R 4 6
The individual is then asked to decide which cards need to be turned
over in order to find out whether the rule is true or false, i.e. seek out
evidence to investigate the truth of the rule. Most individuals say that
only the D must be turned, or else the D and the 4. But turning the 4 is
irrelevant since the rule would allow any letter to be on the back. Most
individuals do not choose the card 6 – which could well demonstrate
the falsity of the rule.
In another related study, individuals are told that the experimenter
has a rule in mind which classifies sets of three integers, which we
will call triples. The individual is then told that an example of a triple
which conforms as the experimenter’s rule is 2 4 6. The individual
is then instructed to try to discover the rule by generating triples for