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...feature familiar people and locations, which means we are less willing to dismiss them outright. Also, because we can't trace the content of dreams to an external source - because that content seems to arise spontaneously and from within - we can't explain it the way we can explain random thoughts that occur to us during waking hours. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and thinking about a bomb exploding in your office, you might say to yourself, "Oh, I watched 24 last night, so I'm just remembering that episode." But people have a harder time making...
...published in Science in 1974. In that paper, Tversky and Kahneman discuss an experiment in which subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries represented in the U.N. Before they guessed, a researcher spun a wheel of fortune in front of them that landed on a random number between 0 and 100. People tended to pick an answer that wasn't far from the number on the wheel, even though the wheel had nothing to do with African countries...
Countless experiments over the ensuing decades have confirmed that most of us make this so-called anchoring mistake - that is, making a decision based largely on an unrelated piece of information, like a random number that appears on a wheel. Anchoring occurs all the time, like when you're asked to look at your Social Security number before answering a question (you're more likely to pick an answer close to the digits in your SSN). A team of researchers even showed in a 2003 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that people will endure more physical discomfort (exposure...
Where does genetics come in? Genetic influences account for a little less than half of the variation in personality within a given population. Some of the variation may be due to random biological processes: just as identical twins don't have exactly the same freckles, they don't have exactly the same brain. Some small amount may be due to socialization - for example, some cultures foster a more aggressive personality. The remainder depends on the experiences people have over the course of childhood and adolescence - experiences they have outside the home, often in the presence of their peers...
Excerpted from The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. Copyright 2009 by Anjoli Inc. and Tom Verducci. Reprinted with permission by Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved...