Overcoming Cognitive Errors
In the last few blogs, I have been hammering on the point that evolution bestowed us with a host of mental short-cuts or heuristics that served us well over millions of years but are not being necessarily suitable in today’s world. In this blog, I will talk about a few strategies or methods that could help us offset the impact of the unsuitable deployment of these subroutines or better yet, avoid their use in the first place.
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” — Gerd Gigerenzer
Knowing about these mental quirks alone is not sufficient. An effective approach would be to know them and then observe their misuse by you and people around you and critically evaluate how such misuse may be impacting their decisions and subsequent outcomes. Making conscious, purposeful effort in understanding them can improve your thinking appropriately.
Here I made an earnest effort to list down impactful themes in which these mental quirks tend to manifest:
“True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” — Daniel Kahneman
Instant Gratification
“instant”: We are hardwired to seek immediate results. “instant”: I would rather eat gulab jamun (or donut) right now than wait until evening. Most of our choices reflect this tendency. In today’s world, where we have no choice but to provide for ourselves for a long future, this tendency generally works against our long-term welfare.
“gratification”: I would rather eat more of those salty potato chips as opposed to vegetables and pulses — this is because the “salty” flavour gratifies me more. Evolution endowed us with ability to detect and favour specific flavours because nutritional food possessed those flavours. But today, flavours have been extracted away from their natural nutrients and rendering the corresponding gratification superficial and harmful, nutritionally speaking.
Social Proof
Vacationing in places like Goa, Maldives, Thailand or Cancun, following Grand Slam tennis events, watching movies like RRR and Avengers, seeking corporate career success etc — as popularly desirable as these may seem, many of us may entertain such desires not necessarily because we personally care for them but because they are popular. We seek social validation in what we wish to possess and accomplish. This is a result of a strong hard-wired tendency to belong to a social group.
As important as it is to follow the protocols of our social group, long term contentment comes from you being true to yourself. When your vocation aligns with your tendencies and interests, there is a good chance for you to create extra-ordinary value for the society and for yourself.
Diversity is essential for progress of any species — you lend diversity to your group by being authentically you. Instead of borrowing others’ goals, you will pursue your own goals allowing you to lead a more purposeful and meaningful life.
Need for Certainty
“Humans appear to have a need for certainty, a motivation to hold on to something rather than to question it. People with a high need for certainty are more prone to stereotypes than others and are less inclined to remember information that contradicts their stereotypes.” — Gerd Gigerenzer
Do you check weather forecasts while planning your travel or your vacation or even something as mundane as daily commute? Do you check news seeking to get sense of when the Ukraine war would end or which politician is likely to win? Are you interested in economic forecasts like GDP growth rate or where the stock market is heading?
We have an overwhelming tendency to seek certainty. We try our best to avoid uncertainty. We take great comfort in the precision and absoluteness of numbers and avoid the ambiguity of probabilities. We struggle to understand that high probability of success still means a distinct possibility of failure. We are profoundly swayed by striking although non-representative stories over more relevant (Bayesian) broad based likelihoods.
We value less relevant but more easily measurable parameters over harder to measure but more appropriate factors in measuring progress. We tend to take up more certain but sub-optimal options over less certain but higher value creating ones. We prefer avoiding small downside at the expense of gaining potentially large upsides.
Competition
Competition is a core evolutionary imperative. Either consciously or unconsciously we tend to be constantly caught up in competing with people around us. We would like to have better career progress, more money, bigger house, bigger car, better spouse etc. In this flux, we end up working hard for things that we may not even care for.
One way to take advantage of this tendency to compete is by competing with ourselves. This will positively channel our competitive spirit.
Need for Action
We are wired to think that progress is proportional to the overall effort we put in. Studying for an exam half-heartedly but for long duration will not prepare you as well as studying with complete focus but for fewer hours. Preparation is generally sacrificed at the altar of “action”. Eight hours of sleep is way more beneficial than two bouts of five hours sleep each. Four hours continuous stretch of deep work is way more productive than eight independent productive hours.
On the flip side, in certain pursuits, we suffer from the opposite tendency. Either due to our preference for status quo or due to our risk averse nature, we sometimes suffer from analysis-paralysis.
Non-proportionality
Nothing gets built overnight — progress is rarely linear, extraordinary success typically comes from compounding progress. Human species have evolved to have a gestation period of nine months — nine women can’t deliver a baby in one month.
Heroic efforts work in movies and there alone. For everyday people, frequent small progresses/improvements for a long period of time result in heroic progress. I know of a number of people who used to struggle to run even one kilometer (few even 200 metres) in the past but are now able to run full and even ultra-marathons. They accomplished this by small but frequent spurts of progress over many years.
Bottomline
“Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.” — Daniel Kahneman, in ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’
All said and done, effectively dealing with cognitive errors is very difficult — it requires energy, patience and discipline. But even little progress on this front can make disproportional positive impact on overall trajectory of one’s life and that makes this pursuit absolutely worthwhile.
PS: I recommend that you read a book called “The Art of Thinking Clearly” by Rolf Dobelli — a very straight forward book that contains the most comprehensive set of cognitive biases that I have ever come across.
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Thanks for taking time to read this. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals and desires. I share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, please do share it with others — of course, only if you do not mind it.
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