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Paul Slovic: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from Paul Slovic, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• You're more certain than you have any right to be

  Ask people how confident they are in an answer, and their stated certainty routinely outruns how often they're actually right. In classic calibration studies, people who said they …

  — Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence Judgments

• A quick gut feeling quietly does the math your brain skips

  Paul Slovic proposed that people often judge risks and benefits not by weighing evidence, but by consulting a fast emotional tag attached to the idea itself: things that feel good …

  — Paul Slovic, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, Donald G. MacGregor, The Affect Heuristic

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