Monday, October 9. 2006
Debugging your brain. Hacking the bad decisions and judgements of your brain.
I've been reading Mind Hacks, and Mind Performance Hacks lately. Awesome books. They have given me the chance to look, and change my brainstate—becoming my own metaprogrammer as it were. Just recently, I ran across a great blog entry titled: 10 Reasons people make bad decisions. I'll post the basics here, but you should really head over there for the full skinny.
If you have some understanding in the ways in which your brain makes flawed decisions, you can stop to think about your decisions, and potentially avoid making them in the future. The first step is to know what these flaws are.
If you have some understanding in the ways in which your brain makes flawed decisions, you can stop to think about your decisions, and potentially avoid making them in the future. The first step is to know what these flaws are.
- Sunk cost bias
This one is simple. People tend to put in more value into thing that they put a lot of time, energy and resources into. Think of that project where thousands upon thousands of dollars were invested upon something that ended up not working anyway. If someone would have killed the project at the $10,000 dollar mark, then $90,000 would have been spared, but how many of us can really be the ones to say "We're throwing in good money after bad here!" - Egocentricism
Egocentricism is something that everyone else has except you, right? The thing about egocentricism is that it is in our nature. There is really only one ego in our brains (usually) and ultimately, according to our brain, it is the only ego that counts. This can cause problems however, because we tend to see things happening to us as being more severe then they actually are. This is exemplified by an experiment described in the linked-to article:In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were connected to a device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers. The researcher began by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger, and so on. Although volunteers tried to respond with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder.
- Confirmation Bias
This happens when our rational brains are short-circuted and we take an event and show it to be linked to our already established notions and opinions. This may be related to memes, and the tendency for memes to self-reinforce. - Overconfidence
Even if you are suffering from the deepest of self-esteem problems, chances are you are overconfident about some aspect of your life. For a good example, talk to any given driver out there "All the over drivers are idiots, but I know how to drive!" Programmers are similar in this regard. - Dysfunctional Competition
This is essentially the fact that our happiness tends to be measured relative to the other peoples happiness around us. We like to think that this is not true, but as this experiment shows:Max Bazerman from Harvard [who performed the experiment, said:] "When I ask people whether they would prefer a) $7 for themselves and for another person or b) $8 for themselves and $10 for the other person, people choose 'b.' However, when people are simply given 'a' or 'b,' 'a' makes them happier."
- The Endowment Effect
This is related to egocentricism. We tend to put more value on objects we already own, rather then their absolute value. In another experiment with mugs performed by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler, a random set of people were given mugs, and another random set of people asked to buy those mugs. The people who had mugs were only willing to part with them for $7, while the buyers were only willing to purchase them for $3. Now that's a seven dollar mug! - Availability Bias
This is the effect where we tend to see probability in terms of memorable events, rather then in terms of their absolute probability. Look at the amount of fear around, and energy spent on the War on Terrorism. It is more likely that you will die from a car crash, or even an STD then a terrorist attack. This also has an effect on the micro-scale of your personal relationships. Sometimes the most negative aspects of a relationship are the ones you remember the most. When this gets combined with confirmation bias, it can make for an insidious combination. - Conformity
This is an obvious one. Now I know that a lot of my frequent readers pride themselves as being non-conformist, but the kind of conformity being referred to here goes a little deeper. Buskers have known for years that if you seed your hat/guitar-case with some money, especially bills and higher denominational coins, people will generally give you more money. This is also called the "Restaurant effect", if you have 2 restaurants with one across the street from another, and one of them is seeded with people on its patio, and the other is not; the seeded restaurant will get more patrons. The effect of conformity is so subtle because most of us believe that we are somehow different, and immune from it, when we truly aren't. That means you Mr. or Miss non-conformist. - Illusion of Control
This is the effect that causes gamblers to bet more on crap shots that they role verus shots that other players role, even though the probabilities are exactly the same. We seem to think that we have more control over a situation then we actually do. - Attribution Error
We tend to think that people act and do things exclusively for our benefit, despite evidence to the contrary. That guy who cut you off in traffic quite likely didn't do it because he was an asshole, he was probably confused, a new driver, or even just distracted. In fact, maybe he is generally an asshole, but we tend to take his actions personally, as if he was cutting you off to be a prick at you, rather then because he is generally a thoughtless prick. The main effect here is that people tend to favor personality based explanations. It is similar to the old saw "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." except, again it focuses on a character trait of the individual (stupidity) rather then what might be a more realistic explanation, such as a mistake, circumstances out of their control, or even other motivations.
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