Psychologists to the Rescue!
by ilene - July 17th, 2009 1:27 pm
I don’t often post book reviews, but this one by Eric Falkenstein is particularly intriguing. I’d also like to welcome Eric as our newest contributor to Phil’s Stock World. Eric’s an economist, author of the book "Finding Alpha," and Managing Member of CapRock Advisors. – Ilene
Psychologists to the Rescue!
Take, for example, the anchoring bias, where people do not adjust their prior beliefs sufficiently when presented with new data. On the other hand, there’s the case where people do not sufficiently account for base rate information, as for example when they are told a woman is quiet and assume she’s a librarian, not saleswoman, even though there are more saleswomen than librarians. Thus, over, or underreaction to information is a common ‘bias’, and so Kahneman’s classic work Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases surveys papers from the 1970s! After a generation, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and where are we? Momentum and mean-reversion are part of the ‘new’ finance, and George Soros proudly notes that his theory of markets has markets biased—though it could be in either direction. Yet, these are not really discovered by behavioral economics, but explained by it on a case by case basis. Prospect theory teaches us that people overweight, or underweight, extreme observations in various contexts. These insights are no more useful than saying the effect of X on Y ‘could go either way, depending on a bunch of other information we probably won’t notice until after the fact’.
A new book about psychiatry, Doctoring the Mind by Richard Bentall argues that the science of the mind is hardly a successful science. He argues that mental illness is on the increase and sufferers in the developed world with access to psychiatric care actually fare
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site