Using our experiences is not always good

 

Follow our experience because as we gain more experience, we become better at making decision. Our wisdom comes from our experience. The Myth of Experience: Why we learn the wrong lessons and ways to correct them by Emre Soyer and Robin Hogarth is another take on behavioral mistakes and the problems of psychology on our decision-making. Their conclusion is that we often take-away the wrong conclusions from our experiences. Experiences that are no assess and filtered will give you the wrong answers. More experiences with the wrong assessment will make you a worse decision-maker. we use experience through linking our actions with results, but if there is not close link between the two, we will find a connection that is often wrong. The authors start with a great example. Learned people used bloodletting for centuries because they thought it worked. You bleed as a cure for a sickness and survive. It must have been the bloodletting that worked. 

We often forget or don't think about what is missing from our experiences. We do not account for the irrelevant. 

Robin Hogarth recently died, and this was one of his last books. He was one of the great researchers on decision-making and human behavior. Tversky and Kahneman have received most of the attention in this area, but Hogarth was a critical researcher in this area one the last 50 years.