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The streetlight effect is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.
It is also called a drunkard's search, after the joke about a drunkard who is searching for something he has lost:
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- A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
The anecdote goes back at least to the 1920s, and has been used metaphorically in the social sciences since at least 1964, when Abraham Kaplan referred to it as "the principle of the drunkard's search".
Video Streetlight effect
See also
- McNamara fallacy
Maps Streetlight effect
References
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Further reading
- Iyengar, Shanto (1993). "The Drunkard's Search". Explorations in Political Psychology. Duke Studies in Political Psychology. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-1324-3.
- Popkin, Samuel L. (1991). "Going beyond the data". The reasoning voter: communication and persuasión in presidential campaigns (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. pp. 92-95. ISBN 978-0-226-67545-9.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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