Sociology 1020 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Risk Perception, Information Literacy, Maria Popova
7 Feb 2018
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Week 3: how what you think can be wrong: fallacies of thought. Information literacy standards for anthropology and sociology students- Why time slows down when we"re afraid, speeds up as we age, and gets warped on. Risk chapter 3: unreliable statistics are too common in public discourse, anchoring rule- number of people hear prior to making a guess influences that guess. When uncertain about the correct answer & guess, gut takes the nearest with the number heard most recently & adjusts downward. Lots of possibilities for manipulation: retail sales, skew public opinion surveys. Even if the number is unmistakably irrelevant it doesn"t matter number- most recently heard- and adjusts but tends to be insufficient- starts to suit one"s purpose. Only as good as our knowledge of what is typical. Gut doesn"t process this info logically- it latches onto plausible details and uses them to judge the likelihood of the whole scenario coming true.
