Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Leslie van der Leer  (Regent's University London) who recently wrote a paper entitled, "The Optimist Within", together with Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway). The paper is to appear in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism, guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. “Let me think it over”, you say as the travel agent advises you to buy insurance. But is this wise? Can we get a more accurate representation of our risks by ‘thinking them over’? Studies by Vul and Pashler (2008) and Herzog and Hertwig (2009) suggest the answer is “Yes”, provided that we combine our considered risk estimate with our initial estimate. These authors found that the well-known “wisdom-of-the-crowd” effect also applies within a single mind. The wisdom-of-the-crowd effect appears when the average of several judges’ estimates (e.g., estimates of the weight of an Ox; Galton, 1907) is more accurate than each indi...