We all like to think that we’re pretty intelligent people; right? We like thinking that our thoughts are crisp, clear and precise. We like telling ourselves that we analyze problems clearly and rationally and never ever act in any way that goes agains some golden rules that we’ve set up for ourselves. Naturally, this is probably as far from the truth as possible. There are a couple of things that we all do, almost all the time, that should go against every rational fiber in our bodies, but never tend to do so. Here’s a list of five of them and the things that we could do to avoid these pitfalls.
1. We tend to try to protect our earlier choices. This is human nature; we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we made a mistake, we try to plow along and act as if the thing we did a day, week or month ago was the best possible thing we could have done. Be ready to admit to yourself that you may actually have made a mistake somewhere on the way and that the best thing you could do is to scrap whatever it was that you did and start over.
For example; assume that you’ve bought tickets to a rock concert. You’ve been listening to this band for a few months and feel stoked to go to the concert. However, the day that the concert comes around, you’re asked to fill in for a colleague at work. You know that this opportunity would pay off greatly; you’d be getting overtime money and the respect of both your boss and your colleague. The boss has hinted that there might even be a promotion involved down the line! Unfortunately, it’s just too late to try to resell the ticket to the concert and none of your friends want to go! And the ticket was so expensive, too! What to do?!
Either way you go, you’ve already paid the money for the ticket to the rock concert. It’s a sunk cost that you won’t be recouping either way. This means that we don’t have to consider it in the equation; no need for the “But I’ve already paid for the ticket …”. Your decision is now down to “Go to rock concert” versus “Perform admirably at work and get a raise”. Hopefully, this should make the decision far easier for you.
2. We tend to follow along in what others are doing. Just because three of your friends bought a Plasma TV doesn’t mean that they are automatically better than the LCD alternative. Their musical tastes, likes and dislikes, their political opinions and subcultural affiliations don’t have to be your own. Just because something is popular doesn’t have to mean that it is right – or even good!
Have you ever wondered why the Da Vinci code was on the bestseller list for so long, without actually being any good? It managed to reach a tipping point where the popularity simply fed on itself and drew even more attention to it. “Well, if Bob, Mary, Claire, David and Brandon are reading it, it simply must be good!”
3. Think for at least ten seconds before guessing. This one is tricky. We always seem to try to guess how something is going to end up or what qualities something has. Especially when it comes to probability, we’re absolutely awful at judging how things will go. People buy their “lucky numbers” every week for the lottery when rational thought should tell them that any group of numbers is just as probable. They look at various statistics and draw outlandish conclusions without considering that there may just be other factors involved.
For example, a popular ‘proof’ of the negative effects of immigration by far-right activists has often been the comparatively high amount of crime commited in people with high immigrant density. With only these two pieces of data (crime density vs. immigration density), there seems to be a clear link, but we need to remember that Correlation Does Not Imply Causation. This rule is so important that it should be capitalized. The link may be, for example, the high amount of poverty in said region. It could be because of the alienation that these people endure. There might be something else entirely that causes this.
4. We form wildly incorrect conclusions when we have insufficient information. Many of the times that you’ve been wrong in your life, it hasn’t been because you were given the wrong information. It was because you weren’t given enough information to draw the right conclusion. Say, for example, that you’ve been told that Mary’s boyfriend was once charged with assault and battery. Then, today, you meet Mary and see she has a bruise on her arm. You may draw the conclusion that her boyfriend grabbed her violently, but there could be literally hundreds of reasonable explanations. The boyfriend may have been incorrectly charged with the assault and Mary may have recently begun training a martial art. As long as you don’t know enough information, you are prone to jump to incorrect conclusions.
5. Misjudging averages. If I were to ask 1,000 people whether they were more, less or equally intelligent than the average person, what do you think the results would be? Many people have tried similar studies and found that almost everybody thinks that they’re more intelligent than the average person. The same holds true for them being better drivers, better lovers, better athletes and better – well, anything else, really! – than the average person. Naturally, this can’t be true, so either the average intelligence is far higher than we think it is or we must be misrepresenting ourselves! Which do you think is more probable?
Well, both of them, really. It’s very easy to misjudge ourselves and lose track of being humble in many situations. We want to think that we’re better than we really are, so we convince ourselves that we are and lose track of who we really are. We often notice the people who are ‘below’ us and snicker to ourselves in joy that we’re so superior, but rarely notice the times when somebody else is ‘above’ us.
The five traps that I’ve mentioned here are nothing but extended versions of five of the literally dozens of cognitive biases that you can read about on Wikipedia. Please visit the site and read up on them, as I’m sure you’ll recognize many from your every-day life.
It turns out your mother was right; good posture is important! We’ve all heard it; our parents admonishing us to “sit up straight!”. They would give us millions of tiny tips and tricks for what the best way to do it is. Hold your stomach in, push your shoulders back, imagine the back of your head is being pulled up by a wire, relax your shoulders, etc. But why is it that we want a good posture, what does it do for us? Also, most importantly, is there anything we can do to get there?