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Dangerous Mental Errors (You Don't Know You're Making)
Episode 58
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Today at a Glance:
Cognitive biases and logical fallacies are systematic errors in thinking and reasoning that negatively impact decision-making quality, logic, and outcomes.
Combatting them relies first and foremost on establishing a level of awareness—both academically and practically.
Part I of this series covered Fundamental Attribution Error, Naïve Realism, the Curse of Knowledge, Availability Bias, and Survivorship Bias.
Today’s Part II covers Loss Aversion, the Spotlight Effect, Heaven’s Reward Fallacy, Confirmation Bias, and Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
Dangerous Mental Errors
A few weeks ago, I shared Part I of a multi-part series on cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
In the opening to the piece, I commented on the fascinating dichotomy of our species:
We possess the capacity to accomplish some complex feat of technology and engineering, and subsequently fall victim to the most obviously flawed base logic. For a hyper-intelligent species, our thinking and decision-making patterns can be pretty fractured.
To be sure, many of these fractures were—for much of human history—features, not bugs. It’s logical to surmise that they were hardwired into our DNA because they made it incrementally more likely that we would survive to reproductive age.
But the facts on the ground have changed—we live in a Digital Age—and our thinking and reasoning pathways have not had enough time to “catch up” to those new realities.
So, we have to force it—we have to fight back and regain control over the quality of our decision-making and logic.
In today’s Part II of the multi-part series, I’ll cover five common cognitive biases and logical fallacies that negatively impact decision-making quality, logic, and outcomes. To really bring it to life, for each one, I’ll provide a definition, example, and perspectives on how to fight back.
Without further ado, let’s dive in…
Loss Aversion
Definition
The pain of losing something is more powerful than the pleasure of winning it.
Loss aversion was first identified by famed behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who found that humans had a tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains.
Accordingly, people were typically willing to take actions to avoid losses that they wouldn’t have taken to seek gains.
Economists had previously assumed humans were rational actors—th
Published on 3 years, 7 months ago