The tricks Mind plays
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Continuing on from my previous blog, here I introduce a few commonly misused mental heuristics. But before jumping into them, a little preamble on “thinking” itself.
A disclaimer: I write this blog, and for that matter all my blogs, with an aim to improve our day to day applied decision making ability and not to reflect the technical advances in the brain science. So, all that I mention here is strictly in that light alone.
What is thinking really? It seems to me that thinking is essentially invocation of established sub-routines (synaptic grooves or neural sieves) in our brain. Sometimes, it may involve creation of new routines as well.
Let’s say that there is a grey-coloured rope in front of you. When you engage your senses to see it, you see a cylindrical, coiled, wrapped-up thing, reflecting certain wavelengths of light You sense objective qualities of the rope through your sense organs and then interpret them into a light-grey rope, another person may interpret it as a slightly darkish-grey rope and yet another person may perceive it as a snake instead of a rope. So, what you perceive may be different from what is objectively out there. This is not always because you are seeing incomplete picture but because your brain chooses to select only certain aspects of what your senses perceive and then interpret those chosen aspects only — erroneously thinking that these aspects sum up to the whole picture. So, this is the first problem with decision making — we don’t necessarily have an accurate idea of the problem we are trying to solve — so, we end up attempting to solve a different problem.
Now, brain refers to its vast database of memory and looks for the ways in which a similar problem was solved in the past. Memory itself is updated with personal experience, vicarious experiences and learnings from other sources like mentors, books, cultural traditions, (legends, myths) etc.
Then, we act on the, thus made, decision. Based on the outcome, we may update ourselves with any lessons learnt or we reinforce our decision-making ability by deeming our decision right, either wishfully or correctly.
Various mental heuristics come into play. To an extent, the quantity and quality of the engagement of these mental heuristics is subjective to each one of us, as it depends on our life’s experiences. But some of it is also common to all of us as we all have inherited the same core mental tendencies from millions of years of evolution as hunter gatherers in insecure and scarce environments.
With this background, here is a brief description of few of the more common mental heuristics (apologies that the word “bias” slips in below. I assert again that these are not biases — just otherwise valid heuristics misemployed.)
“Your worst enemy cannot harm you
As much as your own thoughts, unguarded.But once mastered,
No one can help you as much,
Not even your father or your mother.”- Siddhārtha Gautama
Anchoring effect
A little experiment here. Please make note of your immediate responses to the following questions:
Question 1: Do you think Mahatma Gandhi was older than or younger than 70 years when he died?
Question 2: How old do you think Nelson Mandela was when he died?
Now, look for the correct answer online. In all likelihood, the number 70 would have anchored your answer
The tendency of unrelated information influencing your decision is called anchoring effect.
Illusion of Certainty
We have compelling preference for certainty, so much so that, we find ourselves, many times, precisely wrong over being approximately correct. We take comfort in the fixed returns of certificates of deposit over the volatility of equity returns. We prefer to develop detailed, well drawn-out plans for complex projects although underlying assumptions tend to unravel every day. Certainty, no matter how ephemeral, calms our nerves.
Action preference
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal
We used to have to move (to act) to get food and keep ourselves safe — progress used to be proportional to action. While action is critical for progress even now, success is also dependent on thinking as much as it is on acting. We crave action and abhor boredom. We fail to recognize that no action could also be a conscious and valid action (decision). Examples: the number of hours you sit at the study table is less important that the number of hours you actually study for the exam. The number of lines of code you write is less important than the amount of code that makes its way to production and gets actually used by the users. Closer home to everyone, try doing nothing for fifteen minutes — I bet you will struggle.
Abstract Vs Story
We have no intuition for numbers beyond ten but we have a great affinity for stories. A single dramatic instance out of a possible thousand scenarios dominates our mind over a statistic such as 80% of the scenarios. News industry is entirely built on exploiting this aspect of our mind.
Confirmation Bias
“Men willingly believe what they wish.” — Julius Caesar
It is so hard to change our mind once it is made up. We tend to filter-out all further information except that which supports or corroborates our decision. Once we decide on the make and the model of car that we are to buy, we tend to see more of such cars on the roads than earlier. Your political leanings are continually reinforced by what you subconsciously choose to notice all around you. Most of the modern “attention” industry (Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, etc) exploit this tendency of our brains.
Social Proof
We crave for validation of our choices from the world around us — in this pursuit, we tend to align with the popular preferences of the society. Various agents like “influencers” prey on this tendency of our brains. Buying fancy apartments in complexes with facilities like swimming pools and fancy gymnasiums is driven equal part by social reasons as by personal needs. FOMO is also a manifestation of this tendency.
Linear Thinking
A water tank is being filled such that every second the quantity of water in the tank doubles. After 30 seconds, the tank is half full — how much longer does it take to get the tank full. If you do not pause and think about it, you may say 30 seconds but the answer is 1 second. “Linear” is how we think but “compounding” is how extraordinary value gets created.
Recency Bias
Our thinking is dominated by recent tidings. A year ago, it felt like salaries will double every two years and today one is hoping to just hang on to a job — salary hike be damned. This is recency effect in play.
Statistics
1% probability of failure still means distinct possibility of failure. Statistics is fundamentally unintuitive to us and this aspect is oft exploited by policy makers, news media and other charlatans. Various items like correlation vs causation, possibility vs probability etc, the widely misunderstood normal curve etc.
Bottomline
“You can have no greater or lesser dominion than the one over yourself. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” introduced the, now popular, two logical portions of our brain –System 1 and System 2. System 1 refers to the fast acting and automatic use of mental heuristics whereas System 2 refers to the conscious, deliberate and effortful thinking. System 2 is predominantly influenced by System 1 in taking its essential cues. System 2 establishes agency to our default actions. This categorization is very important to understand because improvement in decision making is not so much about improving our System 2’s analytic abilities but about reducing the misemployment of unsuitable cues from System 1.
***************************
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.
For more about me:
Rama on Linkedin (CV and Blogs)
