One of the well documented thinking errors is the selection effect, roughly defined as the selection of a population’s sample that is not representative of the population yet is used in thinking as being representative.
Good enough, you think. Indian students you encountered at the local expensive international school represent Indians in India. The Jamaica you saw during your 24 hour cruise port of call tells you everything about Jamaica. The three bad boyfriends you had prove that all men are scoundrels.
Almost every experience we have is tainted by the selection effort as a population cannot be fully understood unless one is immersed in it, and even then that individual will need time, circumstance, and often, to not be present so as to avoid those taints as well like the Hawthorne effect. Researchers that used the most heightened techniques to avoid bias still work from 9 to 5, for example, and won’t capture the findings outside this window. If you only observed humans during waking hours then you’d have no idea that we sleep!
Given this reality, the question to ask of the information we’re receiving is not whether it is tainted, it is how it is tainted. And once you understand how, you will use that more appropriately to form a more narrow conclusion that hypothesizes about the sample and not the population. The human mind loves cognitive shortcuts even in the face of contradictory evidence. It wants a simple and direct cause-and-effect relationship between a variable and an outcome. Those are not so easily found in real life so interrogate your sample more to ensure your conclusion suits the data and isn’t prey to the selection effect.
