{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Tom Gilovich On the Spotlight Effect","description":" Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. \u201cWe're dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, \u2018Huh?\u2019 That's interesting.\u201d He adds, \u201cAt the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences,\u201d which means understanding how understandings come about also has great import. \u201cA lot of the research on judgment and decision making is that there's a schism between the rational choice and the psychologically compelling choice,\u201d Gilovich continues, \u201cand that has provided fertile ground for psychologists like me to explore it: \u201cOK, this is what the rational analysis suggests. Why don't we do that?\u201d And there's often some interesting psychological answers to that. Doesn't make logical sense, but it makes lots of psychological sense.\u201d In that spirit, Edmonds and Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, run through what Edmonds calls \u201cthe greatest hits\u201d of Gilovich\u2019s research findings. These include the \u201cspotlight effect,\u201d which posits that individuals often assume others pay more attention to them than they are, and its cousin, \u201cthe illusion of transparency,\u201d in which people assume others recognize their feelings and emotions accurately. They also look at regret, bias blind spots, and why third-place finishers are happier than second-place ones. Gilovich is the co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He\u2019s written or co-written several books, ranging from the academic (the textbook Social Psychology written with Dacher Keitner, Serena Chen and Richard Nisbett), titles that bridge academia and the general public (2002\u2019s The psychology of intuitive judgment: Heuristic and biases written alongside Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman), and books that bring psychological insights directly to the public (such as 1999\u2019s Why smart people make big money mistakes\u2014and how to correct them: Lessons from the new science of behavioral economics with Gary Belsky and 2015\u2019s The wisest in the room: How you can benefit from social psychology\u2019s most powerful insights with Lee Ross).   ","author_name":"Social Science Bites","author_url":"http:\/\/www.socialsciencebites.com","html":"