Mistake

About: Mistake is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4260 publications have been published within this topic receiving 55900 citations.

The Correspondence Bias

Abstract: The correspondence bias is the tendency to draw inferences about a person's unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur. Although this tendency is one of the most fundamental phenomena in social psychology, its causes and consequences remain poorly understood. This article sketches an intellectual history of the correspondence bias as an evolving problem in social psychology, describes 4 mechanisms (lack of awareness, unrealistic expectations, inflated categorizations, and incomplete corrections) that produce distinct forms of correspondence bias, and discusses how the consequences of correspondence-biased inferences may perpetuate such inferences. One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and petty ones to fear. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886/1984, p. 59) Despite the homilies of philosophers, no one has yet found a simple formula for understanding others. The problem, of course, is that a person's inner self is hidden from view. Character, motive, belief, desire, and intention play leading roles in people's construal of others, and yet none of these constructs can actually be observed. As such, people are forced into the difficult business of inferring these intangibles from that which is, in fact, observable: other people's words and deeds. When one infers the invisible from the visible, one risks making a mistake. Three decades of research in social psychology have shown that many of the mistakes people make are of a kind: When people observe behavior, they often conclude that the person who performed the behavior was predisposed to do so—that the person's behavior corresponds to the person's unique dispositions—and they draw such conclusions even when a logical analysis suggests they should not. In this article, we describe the causes and consequences of this particular mistake, which we call the correspondence bias. We do not attempt a complete review of the voluminous literature on this topic. Rather, we first define the correspondence

The technology of teaching

Abstract: More than 60 years ago, in his Talks to teachers on psychology , William James (1899) said: ‘You make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programs and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.’ In the years which followed, educational psychology and the experimental psychology of learning did little to prove him wrong. As late as 1962, an American critic, Jacques Barzun (1962), asserted that James’s book still contained ‘nearly all that anyone need know of educational method’. Speaking for the psychology of his time James was probably right, but Barzun was clearly wrong. A special branch of psychology, the so-called experimental analysis of behaviour, has produced if not an art at least a technology of teaching from which one can indeed ‘deduce programs and schemes and methods of instruction’. The public is aware of this technology through two of its products, teaching machines and programmed instruction. Their rise has been meteoric. Within a single decade hundreds of instructional programmes have been published, many different kinds of teaching machines have been offered for sale, and societies for programmed instruction have been founded in a dozen countries. Unfortunately, much of the technology has lost contact with its basic science.

The heart of darkness: the impact of perceived mistakes on physicians.

Abstract: Objectives:To describe how physicians think and feel about their perceived mistakes, to examine how physicians’ prior beliefs and manners of coping with mistakes may influence their emotional responses, and to promote further discussion in the medical community about this sensitive issue. Design:Audiotaped, in-depth interviews with physicians in which each physician discussed a previous mistake and its impact on his or her lift. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed qualitatively and the data organized into five topic areas: the nature of the mistake, the physician’s beliefs about the mistake, the emotions experienced in the aftermath of the mistake, the physician’s way of coping with the mistake, and changes in the physician’s practice as a result of the mistake. Participants and setting:Eleven general internists and medical subspecialists practicing at a community, university-affiliated hospital in Oregon. Results:Themes emerging from analysis of the interviews were the ubiquity of mistakes in clinical practice; the infrequency of self-disclosure about mistakes to colleagues, family, and friends; the lack of support among colleagues; the degree of emotional impact on the physician, so that some mistakes were remembered in great detail even after several years; and the influence of the physician’s professional locus of control on subsequent emotions. Conclusions:The perception of having made a mistake creates significant emotional distress for practicing physicians. The severity of this distress may be influenced by factors such as prior beliefs and perfectionism. The extent to which physicians share this distress with colleagues may be influenced by the degree of competitiveness engendered by medical training. Open discussion of mistakes should be more prominent in medical training and practice, and there should be continued research on this topic.

Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization

Abstract: Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.