David Silbey, an expert in transportation history, and Ned Augenblick, a psychologist specializing in human behavior on trains, join Katy Milkman for an episode discussing how people overreact to poor quality or incomplete information. They examine historical examples like the myth of "railway madness" and the USS Maine explosion, highlighting the tendency to assign great importance to news stories without significant impact. The episode also explores the biases in belief updating and the trade-off between lab experiments and real-life situations in behavioral science research.
