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: the dark goddess of replevin speaks

dialectical bootstrapping

I'm all about making better decisions, so imagine my delight when I stumbled on research by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig of the University of Basel about a decisionmaking technique with the added benefit of a delightfully jargon-loaded name.

According to the article,

Dialectical bootstrapping is a method by which an individual mind averages its' own conflicting opinions, thus simulating the "wisdom of the crowd." In other words, dialectical bootstrapping enables different opinions to be created and combined in the same mind. For example, in this study, participants were asked to identify dates of various historical events. After they gave their initial answer, the participants were asked to think of reasons why the answer may be wrong and were then asked to come up with an alternative second (dialectical) answer.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that the average of the participants' first answer with the second answer was much closer to the correct answer, compared to the original answers on their own. In addition, the dialectical bootstrapping method (that is, thinking about why your own answer might be incorrect and then averaging across estimates) resulted in more accurate answers compared to simply making a second guess without considering why the first answer may be wrong.

These findings suggest that dialectical bootstrapping may be an effective strategy in helping us come up with better answers to many types of problems.

Cool.

Full post as published by the dark goddess of replevin speaks on March 15, 2009 (boomark / email).