Articles on Cognitive Biases
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Confirmation bias is your tendency to seek out and interpret evidence as confirmation of your current belief or position. It can make you ‘double-down’ on an objectively bad decision. It’s the reason why horoscopes work and why people remember the same event in different ways.
How you look and what you wear to a job interview is probably more important than your actual qualifications for the job. Most of us don’t want to believe that. We’ll kick and scream and rally against the machine, but the fact remains: we like people who look good […]
I once played a game with a colleague that he didn’t know he was playing. He and I were standing across from one another and chatting when I happened to notice that we both had our arms crossed. I realized there was a pretty good chance that if I uncrossed my arms, he would do the same and uncross his. I put my theory to the test and uncrossed my arms. Moments later, he followed my action and uncrossed his arms. Ah, the power of social proof […]
It took me 10-years to break a personal bad habit. Five years of knowing I wanted to stop, and another five years of actually trying to stop before I beat it. How many bad habits have you been able to shake? Probably less than you’d like, if any at all. That’s the power of commitment and consistency bias. We are creatures of habit, for better or for worse […]
What if you could actually increase sales of a product by raising its price? Sounds like magic, right? It’s true though. There are circumstances where increasing the price of a product will help it sell. And there’s a pretty simple reason why. But first, a story […]
Has a car salesman ever offered you a cup of coffee or a glass of water upon entering the dealership? Have you been handed a free sample of a product as a gift? Invisible mental biases are consistently influencing the decisions you make. And one of the strongest and most important to understand is your tendency to reciprocate the favors, disfavors and concessions of others […]
You are incentivized to believe to be true the things that you want to be true. If the significance of this idea does not immediately capture you, be patient. Sit with it. Lay with it. Fight with it. And then accept it, because fewer ideas are more important to your everyday life.
The human brain has evolved over 7-million years to survive in a very dangerous world. Mental programming like the “flight or fight” instinct helped us to live and reproduce in desolate environments with scarce resources. Today, much of the earth’s population experiences a very different world to that of our ancestors, and yet our brains’ mental biases […]
Commercials have a long history of using well known television characters (and the actors who play them) in their spots to leverage authority bias. I recently saw a Dell commercial using Jim Parsons in character as Sheldon Cooper from the hit show, The Big Bang Theory, to try and sell computers. It’s an effective technique […]