The Warren Harding Error and Putting Pieces Together

The Dark Side of Thin-Slicing Rapid cognition can sometimes lead us astray due to unconscious prejudices. We can make snap judgments that fail to get below a surface impression. e.g., 80% of IAT takers end up with “pro-white associations,” which means that it takes them longer to complete association answers when they are required to put good words into the “Black” category than when they are required to link bad things with black people (p. 84). Of the 50,000 African Americans who have taken the Race IAT, half have stronger associations with whites than with blacks (p. 85).

The Dark Side of Thin-Slicing Correlation between height and CEO’s: 14.5% of U.S. population is 6 feet or taller, but almost 60% of the Fortune 500 Companies’ CEOs are 6 feet or taller. Only 3.9% of U.S. population is 6 feet 2 inches or taller, but almost 33% of all CEOs are; only 3 U.S. presidents have been below-average height. Each 2cms is worth 3.5% in income later on in life, the study says

The Dark Side of Thin-Slicing: Looking for the “Lay-Down” Unconscious and unintended prejudices (car prices, mortgage rates, taxi cabs, job interviews, medical care, etc.) = familiarity breeds comfort (radio programming) Ian Ayres (U. of Chicago): 38 people white men, 7 white women, 8 black women, 5 black men Figure 1 Figure 2

The Dark Side of Thin-Slicing: Predatory Lending - Nationally, African American applicants are 2.38 times more likely to be denied a conventional mortgage loan than white applicants. Latinos are rejected 1.63 times more often than whites. Lending disparities remain even when minority groups are compared to whites of a similar income level. In fact the gap widens at higher income levels, with high-income minorities often facing steeper denial rates than low-income whites. - In the Seattle-Everett area, for instance, African Americans earning more than $90,000 per year are 1.39 times more likely to be turned down for conventional mortgage loans than whites earning less than $39,000.

Jha, A. K. et al. N Engl J Med 2005;353: Comparisons of the Rates of Three Major Surgical Procedures Performed in Two Periods (1992 through 1994 and 1999 through 2001) among Black Men and White Men and among Black Women and White Women per 1,000 Persons Enrolled in Medicare

The Wisdom of Crowds: Decentralization Decentralization fosters, and is in turn fed by, specialization—of labor, interest, attention, etc. Specialization tends to make people more productive and efficient - Adam Smith and the advantages of specialization: (e.g., pins and “focused factories”) 9/11 & decentralization

The Wisdom of Crowds: Decentralization The failure of 9/11 was not due primarily to the decentralization of the American intelligence community, as it was to the lack of any aggregating mechanism—e.g., stock market, casinos or bookmakers, etc—that could tap into the wisdom of: NSA people, CIA operatives, FBI agents (below), and the Pentagon (“Able Danger”). There was, in fact, healthy decentralization but no aggregation, and therefore no organization to “connect the dots.” We had the dots.