Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
by Richards J. Heuer Jr.
7 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Psychology of Intelligence Analysis:
The scientist seeks to disprove a hypothesis, not to confirm it. A hypothesis is accepted only when it cannot be rejected.
Many surveys and laboratory experiments have shown that people generally perceive their own actions as the cause of their successes but not of their failures.
Once the bell has rung, it cannot be unrung.
Specifically, information that is vivid, concrete, and personal has a greater impact on our thinking than pallid, abstract information that may actually have substantially greater value as evidence. For example: • Information that people perceive directly, that they hear with their own ears or see with their own eyes, is likely to have greater impact than information received secondhand that may have greater evidential value. • Case histories and anecdotes will have greater impact than more informative but abstract aggregate or statistical data.
When inferring the causes of behavior, too much weight is accorded to personal qualities and dispositions of the actor and not enough to situational determinants of the actor’s behavior.
People also overestimate their own importance as both a cause and a target of the behavior of others.
Hindsight biases influence the evaluation of intelligence reporting in three ways: • Analysts normally overestimate the accuracy of their past judgments. • Intelligence consumers normally underestimate how much they learned from intelligence reports. • Overseers of intelligence production who conduct post-mortem analyses of an intelligence failure normally judge that events were more readily foreseeable than was in fact the case.
