The Mind Does More than Just Play Tricks on You
The same shortcuts that help us save time can trip us up too
I wrote a similar post with a more financial perspective, which was featured on: “From $100k to $1M” & More. If you are interested, check it out here :)
Last broadcast’s Coherence Metric score was 7.112 ,placing it #1 overall!! To understand what the Coherence Metric score is, check it out here :)
Hello everyone, today’s broadcast is about how our brain sometimes works against our best interests, leading us to accept the wrong conclusions or make the wrong decisions. In a typical day, many of us make around 35,000 decisions- The sheer data and information that needs to be received, understood and analysed for us to make these decisions is immense.
Our brains have certain mechanisms that help us make many of these decisions almost instantaneously, with typically amazing accuracy, often using shortcuts and heuristics to aid in this rapid decision making. However, some of these shortcuts can lead to biases or skewed thinking, especially if some data is more nuanced than in face value. This can often impact decisions, leading us astray.
Stories sell better
As people, we love stories. We love it when things have a beginning, middle and end. We especially love when things are explainable. Even when there is no obvious causal effect, or if there is no evidence for one, we automatically try to fill the gaps with the most plausible explanations ourselves. Our mind prefers to always assume that events happening were directly because of other events, when they may have in fact been due to simple regressions to and from the mean.
For instance, let’s imagine you go out with friends for some bowling. You and your friends are all taking turns when you start to notice you are actually doing well. Either bowling spares or 9’s, and even a couple of strikes (3 in a row!) After a while you may think you have a special talent, or at least a very learned bowling skill. Maybe it’s the way u release the ball, or maybe it’s the lucky ball u always take, sometimes making everyone wait until your favourite ball is back. However, the most likely reason for your good score is random luck, and you are currently experiencing favourable variation.
Lets say the game wins, and you begin anew. However, this time, you may feel the illusion of validity- you assume that your good score was purely because of the things you did. You begin to give advice to others, suggests how they should throw the ball, or recommending using a different ball. You may also develop hubris, the illusion of your own skill, and have excessive overconfidence. You may even begin to experiment, maybe trying different bowling styles or trying out new balls, thinking that your ‘skill’ will more than make up for it. However, your great score was only due to favourable randomness, so all of these antics will only decrease your score.
Therefore, as a result, not only may your bowling score regress back to the mean, but all your arrogant actions have meant that your score has dropped even more significantly!
Let’s keep this bowling example going. One of your friends is incredulous at how much your score varied. But he either refuses, or neglects the idea that this was just pure variation, and instead, tries to search for a causal explanation. Therefore, he goes up to you and asks: ‘there’s no way you did that well then did that bad- did you intentionally do bad?’ This is an example of the halo effect: where previous positive information about myself (us being friends, my previous game’s score) influences the way things (in this case my bowling skill) is perceived. My friend was impacted by the halo effect, as he was quicker to question my effort rather than my bowling ability.
When he asks you, you might hesitate. Do you admit the truth, that you tried just as hard but simply the pins weren’t falling as easily? Or do you try keep your mystique, and go along with the idea that you didn’t try? After a couple seconds, you tentatively say that yeah, you didn’t really try. Your friend accepts this by saying ‘yeah I thought so, there’s no way your score dropped so far’. Your friend now was impacted by confirmation bias- where his search for information (asking me the question) was only really in order to confirm their belief to be true- his research was confirmatory, not exploratory. Apparently, the fact that you hesitated, and your response was uncertain, did not trip any alarm bells in his head.
Such an example shows how people are often inclined to try find a causal explanation, where one thing clearly leads to another, and this is why something happened, rather than acknowledging that often, things happen due to randomness, and if the exact same situation happened, a wide variety of results may have been achieved.
Here’s a more general example everyone might have experienced. lets say you go to a grocery shop looking to buy some vegetables, like carrots. When u get there you see that there’s only one carrot left in the crate. Do you take it?
Most people don’t take it- many often assume that its there for a reason: something must be wrong with it, why haven’t others picked it? Maybe it’s mouldy? Rationally, these products always have to pass a quality control in order to be able to put it on display in the first place, but this fact is often neglected. The most likely reason for the apple being there was that it simply wasn’t picked. Therefore the grocery shop business knows that if you want to sell more produce, you need to put a lot more on display than you plan on selling: that same apple won’t stand out if its in among dozens of apples. (This bias is actually one contributor to the vast amounts of food waste that is generated across the world., as shops have to overstock).
Who Likes Numbers Anyway
What most people do not like, are numbers, and especially statistics. Statistics or difficult-to-interpretate numbers do not evoke the same emotions, and as a result statements saying the same things can have different reactions:
-Approximately 0.00044135% of the UK population were killed or seriously injured in car crashes in 2022
- Approximately 29,795 people were killed or seriously injured in car crashes in the UK in 2022
The first statement does not cause the same feelings as the second- the second statement is more visceral, no calculations required, and the scale is more easily imagined. If you are ever trying to make a point, using raw figures will have more of an impact than percentages
Just a side note, on the UK Government website where I sourced the data, car crashes were referred to as ‘road collisions’ - an interesting use of ‘careful talk’, something which i wrote about In this broadcast!
Statistical-induced Illusions
Even worse than complicated numbers, our perception of probabilities is also something that a vast majority of people struggle with, especially around the extremes: Leading to the possibility effect and uncertainty effect:
Possibility Effect
This effect comes into play when the probability of something happening increases from zero to a small number, say from 0% → 5%. We are likely to overweight the possibility of that 5% event happening, and the impact on a person’s perception of this change is much larger than in a scenario where an event went from 35% → 40% probability.
This effect is most visibly seen in lotteries- technically it is possible, but more weight, time and money is dedicated to winning it than statistically advisable. this effect is more pronounced if the event is vivid or easily imaginable, new or emotional. It’s why many expect their favourite team to dominate in a finals match (when mostly likely it will be a tight contest- both teams deserved to reach the final after all), or for a more morbid example, its why some hope so strongly for a miracle recovery in a patients condition.
However, it’s not just about overweighting the possibility- one can either overweight it or more simply, completely ignore it. However, I’m not sure that’s the definitive right answer here either- you never want to ever be caught completely lacking, but it its truly difficult for people to find the balance.
Certainty Effect
Similar to the possibility effect, a disproportionate effect is felt when changes in probability lead to certain outcomes → many people prefer to pay a premium for the sense of certainty. Let’s give you an example, with two options- which one do you pick?(there will be a poll below :))
Option A→ a 95% chance to receive $1,075
Option B→ a 100% chance to receive $1,000
The more logical answer is to take option A, as it has the higher expected value (E[v]=0.95 x 1,075 ≈ 1021), but take a second to think about your thought process and the internal thinking that took place while you were making your decision:
A perfectly logical person would have immediately chosen option A as soon as they would have calculated the expected values. Maybe you did the calculations too, but if you hesitated at all, I would argue that that shows the irrationality of our brains- there’s just something about being certain, completely certain of something, that we are ready to give up some value, some benefit for it.
Steering the Conversation
Although numbers and statistics don’t have much of an influence on our emotions, the way they are presented can: the framing effect is where one’s choice from a set of options is influenced more by the presentation than the substance of the information. Essentially, the question itself does not matter, only how it is presented to you. Lets give an example, you have to pick one of these 2 options: (of course, there will be a poll below for this as well :))
→ You have to do an activity A, where you have a 99% chance to survive
→You have to do an activity B, where you have a 1% chance of dying
Which one did you pick? Did you prefer one over the other? Without any other information, the two activities actually convey the same information, but changing the way they are presented has an outsized impact on our decision making.
it’s no accident why you have never seen tooth paste that proudly displays a note saying “Only one in ten dentists hate this!!” Next time you read any advertisement or piece of information, check out in how many forms the same information could have been presented, which one was chosen.
It doesn’t even have to be on purpose or anything sophisticated: if you ask someone how a football match between Team A and Team B went, and they said Team A won, you are likely to think of things that Team A specifically did that contributed to their win. If they said Team B lost, you are likely to think of mistakes or errors that Team B may have done to contribute to the loss.
You haven’t heard any other information, maybe not even the score, but your brain already tries to construct a narrative to fill in the blanks to make sense of the limited information given to you. Although this example is harmless, you can see how sometimes this kind of plug-the-gap technique can lead to dangerous or misleading assumptions, through direct fault of their own. incomplete information isn’t dangerous because it’s incomplete, its dangerous because its enough to create a story.
While these shortcuts enable us to function and make thousands of tough decisions every day in fractions of a second, these same shortcuts can trip us up. Although it may be impossible to have a completely rational mind, one can take steps to ensure their decisions are of the best quality they can reach: Ensure that certain pieces of information are not overweighted or neglected, and if you have an intuitions or hunches, take some time to determine if this is as a result of valid data and conclusions or due to something else. These biases often have a greater impact on decision making when you are more tired or doing other tasks simultaneously.
You may be wondering if that bowling example happened in real life- to that I will only say it may or may not have happened. I may or may not have gotten a score of 124 in the first game, then I may or may not have gotten a score of 46 in the second game…
That’s all from me for now, but stay tuned for future broadcasts,
This has been Kunga’s Written Radio
Check out last weeks broadcast here →
This was a great article! And, I love the fact you have "written radio" in your name. So smart! Keep up the good work!
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