Original source: SimoleonSense.com .
Could this be a new bias….or is this a clever article talking about Type 1 and Type 2 error.
Introduction (Via Science Daily)
When people look for things that are rare, they aren’t all that good at finding them. And it turns out that the reverse is also true: When people look for something common, they will often think they see it even when it isn’t there. A new report published online on January 14th in Current Biology, offers new insight into why this happens and may suggest some simple methods to help airport security personnel looking for weapons and radiologists looking for tumors get better at their jobs, according to the researchers.
Excerpt (Via Science Daily)
But that adaptive inclination in nature can cause problems when people start looking for rare things, like guns in baggage or breast cancer. Airport screeners know there probably isn’t a gun in your bag, and radiologists know that a tumor probably isn’t going to be there, but they really want to catch it if there is. “We aren’t well-built for that and make more errors than we’d like.”
Wolfe thinks that there may be ways to solve this problem, or at least to improve upon our searching skills. He says that his team suspects error rates may be lowered by offering people in jobs like these some simple retraining at the start of every shift. If they spend a couple of minutes doing a simulated search for common weapons or tumors, they might then do a better job at really finding rare ones for the next 30 minutes or so.
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