onegoodmove

Making sound judgments is difficult enough without having to deal with faulty and misleading research. There is a great link at metafilter that discusses one aspect of that difficulty. The article it links to is well worth reading. It reminded me of a book I read many years ago that had all kinds of great advice on the subject. I don't know if the book is still available, but I would recommend it highly to anyone that wants to make better judgments. I believe the title is: Human Inference: Strategies & Shortcomings of Social Judgment by Nesbitt & Ross. One bit of advice that has influenced me ever since reading this was when making a judgment about a person; disposition or unchanging characteristic to remember that behavior may be caused by situational constraints. How often we forget that advice and how often it causes us problems. I suppose that is why I'm so fond of the Oliver Wendell Holmes quotation I posted previously. "Truth is just a name for what is impossible for a person to doubt." If you can identify the situational constraints a person is subject to it certainly helps in understanding why they believe or behave the way they do.