Famous British magician and hypnotist Deren Brown shows a psychological deception in a documentary.
The method is simple, first, get a large enough contact list and email everyone on the list that you have the ability to predict the outcome of a horse race and that you will prove it to them.
Assuming there are five horses in each race, divide the contacts on the list into five groups, each of which is to "predict" a different winner. Then there are four sets of rosters that will receive a false prediction, but another set of rosters who will believe that you can predict the correct outcome at least once.
Repeat this process, with enough Latest Mailing Database time and enough rosters, and after 4 or 5 rounds, you'll get die-hards who believe in your predictive abilities. Because of psychological biases, we follow our own feelings, which can lead us to make irrational wrong decisions, or to follow some incorrect theoretical concepts.
For example: I heard that what other people use is very effective, and I have to buy it back quickly, regardless of whether I am suitable or not, or I am crazy about success.
This one-sided psychological manifestation is survivorship bias .
Survivorship bias , also translated as "survivorship bias", is a cognitive bias . The fallacy of its logic is that it focuses too much on the current person or thing "surviving certain experiences" while often ignoring the person or thing that is not within the horizon or cannot survive these events.
The fallacy takes the form: individual A of surviving process B has property C, so any individual surviving process B needs to have property C. Individuals with trait C but not surviving process B are ignored and not discussed.
The logical deviation is to only focus on the screening results for evaluation, while ignoring information such as screening conditions and screening mechanisms.
The common saying "dead people can't speak" to explain its causes means that when the channel for obtaining information is only from the survivors (because there is no source from the dead), this information may deviate from the actual situation.
This bias can lead to various erroneous conclusions.
The concept of survivorship bias originated during World War II.
During World War II, Allied warplanes were severely damaged in the war. Every time the fighter jets returned, they were covered with bullet holes, and the army believed that it needed to be better reinforced and protected.
But which parts should be reinforced?
The original idea was to attach armor to the places in the entire fleet that were hit most often by bullets, so they calculated the damage to the returning planes and drew a diagram. After analysis and research, it was found that the wing is the most vulnerable position in the entire aircraft, but the tail is the least attacked position.
According to the original logic, the reinforcement of the aircraft should be placed on the wing section.
Abraham Ward, a professor of statistics at Columbia University in the United States, accepted the request of the military and used his professional knowledge in statistics to give advice on how to strengthen the protection of aircraft to reduce the probability of being shot down by artillery fire. Professor Ward's suggestion was the exact opposite of what the military originally thought, and he concluded that "we should strengthen the protection of the tail".
Professor Ward's conclusions are mainly based on the following aspects:
The sample of this statistic only covers the bombers that returned after Ping An crashed without being hit;
The bomber that has been hit many times on the wing seems to be able to return safely;
In the tail, the reason for the fewer bullet holes is not that it is really not easy to be shot, but that once it is shot, the possibility of its safe return to life is very small.
The Allies eventually took the professor's advice, and it was later confirmed that the decision was entirely correct.
As early as the 1930s, Dr. Joseph Rhein began testing whether extrasensory perception (ESP) really existed. To get around this, he tested whether anyone could successfully guess the order in which a deck of cards was shuffled. He initially used regular-format playing cards, but later switched to Zener cards specially designed to prevent participants from tacitly guessing that their familiar playing cards were the same as the real guessing cards.