Health Quote by Thomas Gilovich

““The more ambiguous the criterion, the easier it is to detect evidence of success. It is for precisely this reason that many alternative health practices do not offer precise remedies for specific disabilities. They promise instead to bring about “wellness,” “higher functioning,” or “better integration”—ambiguous benefits that may be hard to refute. Faith healers take full advantage of ambiguous criteria and studiously avoid pinning themselves down to verifiable predictions.””

Thomas Gilovich

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“Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, “we tend to believe what we think others believe” and turns it around: We tend to think others…

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“Finally, it has been shown that the tendency for people to think of themselves as above average is reduced—even for ambiguous traits—when people are…

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“It appears that the probabilistic sciences of psychology and medicine teach their students to apply statistical and methodological rules to both scientific and everyday-life problems, whereas the nonprobabilistic science of chemistry and the nonscientific discipline of the law do not affect their students in these respects (p. 438)…. the luxury of not being confronted with messy problems that contain substantial…

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“To live, it seems, is to explain, to justify, and to find coherence among diverse outcomes, characteristics, and causes.”

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“social psychologist Ziva Kunda, who argues that people are indeed more likely to believe things they want to believe, but that their capacity to do so is constrained by objective evidence and by their ability “… to construct a justification of their desired conclusion that would persuade a dispassionate observer. They draw the desired conclusion only if they can muster…

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We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient,…

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“our difficulty in accurately recognizing random arrangements of events can lead us to believe things that are not true—to believe something is systematic, ordered, and “real” when it is really random, chaotic, and illusory. Thus, one of the most fundamental tasks that we face in accurately perceiving and understanding our world—that of determining whether there is a phenomenon “out there”…

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“We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves…

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“In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of…

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What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe

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“develop the habit of employing one of several “consider the opposite” strategies. We can learn to ask ourselves, for example, “Suppose the exact opposite…

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