One of the peculiar features of bias is a tendency to want to have it both ways. Take for example the criticism of Bob Dylan’s agreement with Starbucks for the coffee chain to exclusively sell his Live at the Gaslight 1962 CD, which contains the earliest known recordings of his classics “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Dylan, who has long been an icon of the 1960s despite repeated attempts to disassociate himself from the era, is accused of “selling out” to a multinational. Yet, there’s no criticism, rejection or even mention of Starbucks’ social programs, such as its practice of matching partner and customer volunteer hours with cash contributions to nonprofit organizations and support for ecological coffee growing. It’s a case of ignoring the inconvenient.

At another level, Dylan’s decision along with those by others, such as Ray Charles’ estate, is indicative of the rising power of artists. Dylan doesn’t have to depend any longer on old established outlets to sell his music. He can bypass them. The deal with Starbucks gives him more leverage in deciding how his music should be distributed. This is subversion 21st-century style. The tension between the creative and the commercial frequently goes wrong and the creative often does not win out. However, just this year, Starbucks was credited with helping the New York folk-rock group Antigone Rising achieve a nationwide audience in the US. In 3 weeks, it sold 35,000 of its debut album, “From the Ground Up.”

Similarly, consumers find themselves with a widening range of choice in where they can buy their goods. They can choose the most comfortable environment, whether it is the internet or a cafe. The shopping experience has become as decisive as the purchase itself. A total of 775,000 albums, or some 25% of the sales of Ray Charles’ last album Genius Loves Company were sold at Starbucks.

Risk aversion and making suboptimal decisions is hard wired into our evolutionary biology. This seems to be the finding of tests on Simian monkeys and their responses to a variety of reward systems.

Essentially, just like humans, the monkeys demonstrate a preference for avoiding loss over the prospect of an extra gain. MRI scans have shown that we compute losses and gains in different parts of the brain, so the latest tests on monkeys revealing they too have a loss aversion suggests some older biological need is being answered.

The Economist reasons that in our natural habitat food supply is erratic, so that the pangs of hunger are felt more keenly than the prospect of abundance. While agriculture and the affluent society have changed all that on the “supply side”, we retain the attitudes of the hunter-gatherer.

In an information society, it becomes much more important to understand these biological drivers and the biases they build into our evaluation processes.

Experience suggests these features of human behaviour are better understood by marketers than economists. As has been observed before, they know the power of the statement “Hurry, while stocks last!”

Conditional probability is not an expression that most people will grasp these days, but the need to understand it is growing.

The current case of the UK’s General Medical Council against Professor Roy Meadows hinges on this arcane statistical concept. That a senior medical figure is accused in a professional court for the misuse of statistics makes this a very modern “crime” indeed. But it is one to which we will no doubt return again and again in future, because very few journalists, let alone the average citizen, are very well equipped to deal with the odds of something happening, let alone when the odds of that something are conditional in some way. We tend to get confused.

Professor Meadow’s evidence led to the conviction of a number of women for killing their children. Notably he argued that there was a one in 73 million chance that both of one woman’s children could have died of natural causes. She ended up in jail. The truth is the opposite. That one child should die is unfortunate and highly unusual, but the likelihood of another dying is increased not decreased. It is in the genes. The two deaths are not necessarily independent, so the chances of lightning striking twice are not less but greater.

H. G. Wells, the father of modern science fiction, argued that “statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.” With the decline in maths teaching in UK schools in the past four years, the outlook is scarcely promising.

To see a much earlier examination of the issue click here.