Christopher Chabris

Multiple Suggested Care Alternatives and Decision-Making of PCPs This randomized clinical trial investigates whether providing primary care physicians (PCPs) with 1 vs 2 or more appropriate treatment alternatives in a choice set has an effect on the odds that they ...

In time for the @pennchibe.bsky.social meeting, our paper about how the number of alternatives influences physician decision-making.

#MedSky #BehaviouralScience

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration | Royal Society Open Science Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications ...

An important set of ideas to counter the growing burden of fraudulent scientific publications:
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Very happy that our paper is officially out at Management Science! Ever wondered if on-the-job experience can mitigate ubiquitous behavioral biases? Well, wonder no more...

With amazing serial co-authors
@cfchabris.bsky.social and @michellemeyer.bsky.social

pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/...

Using Chess to Study Overconfidence A new study on chess players explored people's overconfidence in a domain with clear measures of performance and the opportunity for people to get feedback.

Psychology research finds people are often overconfident. Open questions in that work that were addressed in a cool paper studying tournament chess players. My latest for @psychtoday.bsky.social with a shout-out to @cfchabris.bsky.social and Daniel Simons.

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulte...

Most people are overconfident even in the face of extensive, objective performance feedback: "Overconfidence persists in tournament chess, a real-world information environment that should be inhospitable to it." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40808249/

The Creativity Choice A “groundbreaking” (Marc Brackett) correction to the myth that creativity is a trait that you’re born with—instead, a Yale scientist proves, creativi...

"The Creativity Choice," a new book by @z-i-pringle.bsky.social, should be a great read for anyone interested in putting creative impulses and ideas into practice!
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dr-zo...

We also found that people often endorse general rationing policies that contradict the specific choices they would make when presented with hypothetical patients. They also prefer not to incorporate factors like patient race, sex, education, and income when creating a policy.

We found that people's choices of which patient should get a treatment can be influenced by the presence of irrelevant extra patients (an example of the attraction effect). This occurred for both laypeople and clinicians when considering ventilator assignment.

Medical rationing choices of laypeople and clinicians are often illogical and inconsistent with their own stated preferences The sudden onset, rapid spread, and later surges of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in shortages of ventilators, pharmaceuticals, and other critical resources, leaving individual clinicians to make rat...

I'm very happy that Pedram Heydari, @michellemeyer.bsky.social, and I have published our study on the internal inconsistencies in the choices that laypeople and medical clinicians make about rationing scarce treatments (such as ventilators and drugs during the Covid pandemic).

Please have a look at our Geisinger Program Evaluation (GPE) job advertisements, and consider applying yourself—or distributing our ads to anyone you think might be interested. (2/2)
GPE Associate Director:
michellenmeyer.com/uploads/2/2/...
GPE Staff Scientist:
michellenmeyer.com/uploads/2/2/...

At Geisinger we have created a new team to conduct and publish rigorous evaluations of important health system initiatives, programs, and interventions. I'm one of the faculty co-directors of this group and I'm happy to say we have two new positions open! (1/2)

Clay Shirky on the impact of generative AI on learning: "As with calculators, there will be many tasks where automation is more important than user comprehension, but for student work, a tool that improves the output but degrades the experience is a bad tradeoff."
www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

Bet you feel silly you didn't spot the fire extinguisher, eh?

The Creativity Choice is OUT! Today is publication day for a very long project; it translates the science of what comes between an idea and the finished product, to help you get from there to here.

Today is the day! The Creativity Choice is out! Starting to see pictures in the wild. Some book bites in my latest newsletter. That I hope get people wanting to come for more:
open.substack.com/pub/creativi...

If you want to work with me and an amazing team of behavioral scientists and other colleagues on improving health decisions, please consider joining our group at Geisinger as a staff scientist!

Can is a great guy with infectious enthusiasm and I highly recommend his Youtube videos, as well as his unique series of Chessable courses, for anyone interested in getting better at chess.

I had a great time talking last week with fellow cognitive scientist and chess master @drcanchess.bsky.social, and you can watch the whole thing! (or listen on Can's "The Chess Cognition Podcast" on your favorite podcast platform)

Essay | The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions Shortly before Daniel Kahneman died last March, he emailed friends a message: He was choosing to end his own life in Switzerland. Some are still struggling with his choice.

A lot to reflect on in this must-read essay by Jason Zweig about the surprising (or not surprising) death of Daniel Kahneman.

Opinion | We’re Demanding Way Too Many Documents From Job Candidates The humanities job market is broken, but there’s one thing we can easily fix.

An accurate description and perceptive lament of just one way needless academic paperwork keeps on piling up.
www.chronicle.com/article/were...

Rooting out scientific fraud and deception is one of the most important things scientists can do. Finally, an authoritative guide!

I guess the title of Chiraag's report gives away the result! But it's a good read anyhow: chiraaggohel.com/posts/llms-e...
Original Yanai & Lercher 2020 paper: genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Now that LLM-based AI tools can analyze data on their own, @chiraag.bsky.social decided to test whether they notice the gorilla, or whether they also seem to experience inattentional blindness—like humans who fail to notice the "invisible gorilla" that @profsimons.bsky.social and I wrote about ...

A fun 2020 paper by @itaiyanai.bsky.social and Martin Lercher found that many students who were given a data set to analyze, along with specific questions to answer about it, failed to notice that a scatterplot of the points formed an image of a gorilla. But can AI models spot the gorilla? ...

YouTube video by BVOLVR (Become. Evolve. Excel) The Elephant in the Room vs The Invisible Gorilla. Who wins?

I've been waiting for the answer to this question for a long time, but if I could have just one wish, it would be for people to stop mixing their large mammal business metaphors by saying "that's the invisible gorilla in the room."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGEH...

The Harvard Effect A new study of over 26,000 influential U.S. people shows that a disproportionate number of them attended Harvard University.

The Harvard Effect: www.forbes.com/sites/jonath... @cfchabris.bsky.social

Peabody Museum opens new neuroscience exhibit The exhibition, entitled “Mind/Matter: The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention and Memory,” explores the history of neuroscience and the wonders of human cognition.

Pleased to see that the Yale Peabody Museum has included the invisible gorilla (by @profsimons.bsky.social and me) in their new exhibit on perception, attention, and memory! Other museums that have exhibited our work: American Museum of Natural History, Exploratorium, Wellcome Collection, & MONA.

Do I qualify?!

I'm thrilled that our paper on base-rate neglect (BRN) and on-the-job experience (w/ @cfchabris.bsky.social and @michellemeyer.bsky.social) was just accepted at Management Science!

TLDR: on-the-job experience with base-rate type problems mitigates, but does not eliminate, base-rate neglect.

1/7

It would be an honor to be on this list :-)

Our department at the Geisinger Research Institute is adding a group of great new faculty members!