Cognitive Traps and Our Own Bias

**dajo** · 03-29-2010 03:49 PM

Cognitive Traps and Our Own Bias

I was thinking of posting this in the science section, but I'd rather have a
broader audience. This thread is supposed to be about our own bias, how
our mind can trick us into believing false things and how decisions we think
we make freely, in reality are rather a reaction by our self-deluding nature.

Also I think this is wonderful for self-reflection and to question one's own
motives and reasons for believing, acting and doing things, the way we do.

My goals for this thread:
1. collecting sources and literature related to the OP for a bigger picture
(If this works out, I can also always edit this post and add them to a list)
2. discussion of examples that would affect us in our daily routine
3. self-analysis, (e.g. do you notice any traps you have fallen into before?
Do you see any in your recent behaviour? - maybe even through posting?)
4. Maybe learning something and avoiding these traps everyone falls into.
5. Maybe even discussion on further implications of our manipulative nature.

I would like to start this off with a Google Talk by Dan Ariely, a behavioral
economist, who is leading a research group at MIT. This focuses on our
irrationality in decision-making and how we are affected by, for example,
given alternatives. I have chosen this talk, because I believe that on the
one hand Ariely is very entertaining to listen to, on the other, he's very
informative and regarded as a leading researcher in this particular field.

If you'd like a shorter version, I'd also recommend his TED Talk.

================================================== =

The second article and the reason I created this thread, is a listing of the
Top 10 Thinking Traps that we fall into really often. Even though most of
them are common knowledge, it is still useful to collect, discuss and think
about them. (Here you could share own experiences with any of the points)

I just copy & paste a summarized version of the article, to avoid a wall of
text, but to still outline the key points. Please visit the link, if you want
more detail and the actual words. I have changed some of the sentences.

Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed — How to Foolproof Your Mind
http://litemind.com/thinking-traps-2/

1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts

Spoiler for The Anchoring Trap:

2. The Status Quo Trap: Keeping on Keeping On

Spoiler for The Status Quo Trap:

3. The Sunk Cost Trap: Protecting Earlier Choices

Spoiler for The Sunk Cost Trap:

4. The Confirmation Trap: Seeing What You Want to See

Spoiler for The Confirmation Trap:

5. The Incomplete Information Trap: Review Your Assumptions

Spoiler for The Incomplete Information Trap:

6. The Conformity Trap: Everybody Else Is Doing It

Spoiler for The Conformity Trap:

7. The Illusion of Control Trap: Shooting in the Dark

Spoiler for The Illusion Of Control:

8. The Coincidence Trap: We Suck at Probabilities

Spoiler for The Coincidence Trap:

9. The Recall Trap: Not All Memories Are Created Equal

Spoiler for The Recall Trap:

10. The Superiority Trap: The Average is Above Average

Spoiler for The Superiority Trap:

and last, but not least, here is an article that focusses on
"Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About".
I'm not sure how much it correlates, but I thought it was
fitting to the general context of the thread and is related
to the question of 'how we function'.

Spoiler for Summary:

Congratulations, you have finished everything. Please discuss now.

**tkdyo** · 03-29-2010 09:06 PM

I really liked this whole post, its quite true for most of us. Even if we are careful, at some time or another we get caught up in out own bias. Whats that last number 10 mean though? I didnt get it from the abstract link.

10. If you’re a man and find yourself in an argument with your significant other,
choose your words very carefully.

either way, if we truly believe in equal rights...women should be just as nice to men.

**dajo** · 03-29-2010 09:13 PM

Yes you are right, without context it's a little odd.

But here is what it said on the page:

10. If you’re a man and find yourself in an argument with your significant other, choose your words very carefully.
Not only do they affect the other person, but research in the journal Health Psychology suggests that they can also significantly impact your health. In the heat of stressful conflict, your brain is commanding the release of a stress-chemical cocktail comprised of proteins called cytokines–produced by cells in the immune system to help the body mount an immune response during infection. Abnormally high levels of these proteins are linked to cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, arthritis and some cancers. This study suggests that how rational or emotional your communication is directly corresponds with the levels of those chemicals in your body and the damage they can do. Thing is, the same rules don’t apply to men and women—levels of cytokines in men show an increase over time, but in women they don’t. Why? Women may just be better at communication, or just luckier in this particular biological lottery.

Article

Basically - words and arguments can affect us physically. Men moreso then women.

Originally Posted by tkdyo

I really liked this whole post, its quite true for most of us. Even if we are careful, at some time or another we get caught up in out own bias.

The issue would be that while we might avoid most of them, most of
the time, there will always be the danger of not thinking clearly at any point.
And I think events have shown that even intelligent people are not excluded.

And just like that I already stepped into number 9.

**juroara** · 03-29-2010 10:58 PM

I agree and disagree! The real traps in our lives aren't something you can find out about by reading something on the internet that puts it so simply as the "top ten thinking traps".

The real traps we encounter in our lives are personal. They could be mental traps given to you by your parents, by your religion or culture, by your school, they could be traps given to you by friends, lovers, strangers, are ones you created all by yourself. These mental 'traps' are worldviews, ideas about life, about how things are supposed to work. Or how things don't work. They effect you virtually every moment. Only YOU can uncover what ever mental limit you have placed on yourself.

The problem with your Top Ten is they are superficial. Sure they offer alternatives to our daily behavior, but they don't even ask us why we have these behaviors to begin with. Your behavior WILL NOT CHANGE until you dig deep. Deeper. Our subconscious is the real force driving most of our activity. Our subconscious is the one pumping out these emotions, and our emotional responses. Which is why, since they don't come from the consciousness, that our emotions seem out of our control.

The relationship between the conscious and the subconscious is a constant feed-loop. If you really want to take conscious control of your decisions, activity and emotions - you need to make a conscious effort to get in tuned with your subconscious. When you do your subconscious will open up and expose your limiting behaviors and beliefs.

When you finally do expose the belief or behavior the subconscious is not going to give it up - unless you are first CONSCIOUSLY willing to accept a new one to replace it! If you DO NOT accept a new one, it WILL NOT give up the old one. Nature abhors a vacuum! Consciously accepting a new behavior to replace an old one, also means consciously accepting that you will change.

Are you comfortable with changing who you are?

Imagine a person who has been suffering from depression all their life:

Their room is a mess because they lack the motivation to clean it. But this mess frustrates them so much they also lack the motivation to do creative activities, like writing or drawing. They don't see the point in dressing up nicely and claim they don't care if other people think of them as ugly. But if other people do they will be emotionally hurt. They overly sensitive and take what everyone thinks or says about them super seriously. And even when they say they don't care what other people think about them, you know its a lie because they say it with bitter anger, or they will moan, whine complain about it later. They use any little thing that went wrong as an excuse to be miserable the entire day, not owning up to where this anger is really coming from.

(No........ do not tell me you've been pissed for the last three hours because you couldn't find a clean spoon!)

What if one day they do decide they want to feel peaceful, satisfied, happy? Is this individual really ready to choose to be happy?

But what does this choice mean? ITS MEANS YOU WILL CHANGE AS A PERSON! It means this depressed person they think they are WILL DISAPPEAR!

They will dress differently, in a way that makes them confident in happy. No, not to please other people or society. But to please them self. They will talk to people differently. They will laugh in public more. They will listen to different music. They might even start to hate their old musical tastes! They will eat differently. They will keep their room clean and BE the person who does create creative things. Rather than be the person who only wishes they were creative. They will be more open to admitting when someone does hurt them, rather then bottling it all up inside (self-honesty). They will have so much more self-respect and love, they can lighten up, and not take every little thing so seriously. And rather than taking every little thing so seriously, they can start to see the humor in mishaps! LIFE CAN BE VERY FUNNY! No more whining. No more moaning. No more excuses.

This is why choosing to be happy is so hard for depressed people. Not all depressed people believe THEY are the ones who need to change. They think happiness should be able to fit into their limiting lifestyle, when it can't. While the saying happiness is within you is true, that doesn't mean it can fit into any lifestyle. Changing a lifestyle is hard because we identify with it so strongly.

An even worse case scenario is an emo who thinks happy optimistic people are ignorant retards! Their false belief literally communicates to their subconscious to never allow them to feel optimistic. Here's why you need to dig deep. Not all emos realize they have this belief. Some of them are just grossed out by happy people

Dig deep into your subconscious. Let go and accept self-change. Otherwise you are never in control of your conscious activity. (or your emotions for that matter!)

**DuB** · 03-30-2010 01:48 AM

It's interesting that somebody other than myself made this thread. I've been thinking about doing something like this thread for a long time (although I was considering focusing on just one or two "biases" and going into greater detail). This is literally almost exactly what I study. In fact, one of my graduating labmates just accepted a postdoc position under Dan Ariely.

Spoiler for better videos:

Anyway, I can't figure out if I am pleased or displeased that these things are being discussed so, erm, "casually" by nonscientists. I suppose the visibility is a good thing. It's just frustrating to see the way people describe some of these phenomena. The findings are so deflated. They come off as trivial and atheoretical. This is almost certainly the kind of thing that the physicist Ernest Rutherford had in mind when he made his infamous "stamp collecting" statement. This is unfortunate because the field of JDM (Judgment and Decision Making, the area from which most of these findings are drawn) is incredibly theoretically rich and highly relevant to so many aspects of life. Another frustrating thing, this time about the list of "top" psychology studies, is that while the findings are billed as cutting edge, most of them are actually just subtle methodological variations on ideas which haven't been new or profound for decades. For example, #1 is (believe it or not) actually a conceptual replication of my advisor's PhD thesis from more than 10 years ago, and #2 is a neuroscientist telling us what a psychologist named Bob Zajonc demonstrated exactly 30 years ago. (It's gratifying to see that this effect occurs somewhere within the brain--just as we suspected!--but it's not very informative. But that's another discussion entirely.) I mean sure, it's interesting stuff, but it isn't new, and the superficial treatment has stripped the findings of their underlying theoretical implications, which is where things really get interesting. (The videos I linked to above are popularized in similar ways--perhaps a little less so--but they're at least a lot more thought provoking, not to mention entertaining.)

That sounds pretty negative, but I don't want to be interpreted as trying to squelch the discussion--far from it. The biases are interesting even on their face. Sunk cost reasoning is utterly ubiquitous, and what makes it all the more interesting is that it's really easy to get people to realize the fallacious nature of their reasoning simply by getting them to think harder about it. ("You already spent 100 of your hard earned dollars which you will never get back, so what on Earth is the rational basis for making yourself even more unhappy by forcing yourself to do something you really don't want to do anymore?")

The blurb about the illusion of control is just the tip of the iceberg of a vast literature on perceptions of causality and correlation. It's been said that nature abhors a vacuum; well, the human mind abhors randomness.

What's really interesting to me about the "superiority effect" is how easily it can be reversed. You simply ask people about something they don't think they're any good at. Then not only do they say that they aren't superior to other people, they actually vastly overestimate the extent to which they are worse than average! This is one of many cases of egocentric reasoning: we place far too much weight on our own thoughts, beliefs and actions when making generalizations about others.

One of the most interesting questions in all of psychology, although only tangentially related to the heuristics and biases literature, is that of self-knowledge. Most people take comfort that, if we can never truly know anything else about any other person, we can at least know ourselves. It turns out that our insight into what actually influences or leads to our behavior is frighteningly limited, despite the fact that we feel so certain about it. If you only ever read one psychology paper in your entire life, it should be this classic.

**dajo** · 03-31-2010 11:31 AM

Alright. Surprising answers.

I just want to make sure that you know that I very much appreciated the
long responses, although I don't have the time right now to answer with as
much detail as I want to. I will in a day or two.

**dajo** · 04-02-2010 11:32 AM