Decision-makers implicitly assume unseen factors are unimportant

Evidence

It was to correct this propensity and to better understand Soviet behavior in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) negotiations that Marshall Shulman, as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s assistant, kept a chart of what he called “correlated activities” (Talbott, 1979, pp. 80, 120, 146), which showed all the events that were likely to be affecting the Russians, not only those which were of primary interest to the United States. Of course, people can draw inferences only when they have some information to work with. But rarely are they aware of the degree to which hidden factors could be more powerful than those about which they are informed. They implicitly assume that factors not in their purview are unimportant. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2580

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘unknown unknowns’ framing and Milgrom-style information-cost arguments from previous chapters. — connects to: Decisions are made under irreducible uncertainty that evidence alone cannot resolve — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 490
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2580