Bias Antidotes Flashcards
Reward & Punishment Superresponse Tendency
Antidotes
● Be wary of people’s actions and behaviors.
Analyze the context to see if there are any ulterior motives.
● Obey Munger’s ‘Granny Rule.’ Granny’s Rule is “children eat their carrots before they get dessert.” Get your hardest work done before rewarding yourself.
Liking/Loving Tendency
Antidotes
● Be aware of how liking or loving others distorts your logic.
● When building relationships with others, do whatever you can to start the relationship off as part of the in group.
Disliking/Hating Tendency
“[A] major difference between rich and poor people is that the rich people can spend their lives suing their relatives.”
Politics is the art of marshalling hatreds.” Anonymous
Doubt/Avoidance Tendency
Antidotes
● Force yourself to take a break and/or delay before making a decision.
Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency
Antidotes
● Realize that every action you take leads to good habits or bad habits. So, endeavor to constantly be creating new, positive habits.
● Be careful about the beliefs you take on. First, find sufficient evidence to disprove your point first before believing in it. Charles Darwin “trained himself, early, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one.
● Find ways to challenge your preconceived beliefs. Elon Musk proactively seeks outideas that challenge his existing beliefs. “At his peak, Einstein was a great destroyer of his own ideas.”
Curiosity Tendency
You need to nurture it and encourage it.
Quotes
Man’s curiosity, in turn, is much stronger than that of his simian relatives.” Munger
Curiosity, enhanced by the best of modern education (which is by definition a minority part in many places), much helps man to prevent or reduce bad consequences arising from other psychological tendencies. The curious are also provided with much fun and wisdom long after formal education has ended.” Munger
Kantian Fairness Tendency
The Kantian Fairness Tendency refers to the pursuit of perfect fairness which causes a lot of terrible problems. Stop expecting the world to be fair and adjust your behavior accordingly.
Envy/Jealousy Tendency
Antidotes
● Disarmother people’s jealousy of you with vulnerability.
● Practice mindfulness when you feel jealous or envious accept and appreciate your emotions. Your emotions often are telling you something about yourself, and being aware of what messages they bring can bring you new personal insights.
Reciprocation Tendency
Antidotes
● Start and develop relationships by proactively giving. Most people will reciprocate.
● “Wise employers, therefore, try to oppose reciprocatefavor tendencies of employees engaged in purchasing. The simplest antidote works best: Don’t let them accept any favors from vendors.”
● “The standard antidote to one’s overactive hostility is to train oneself to defer reaction. As my smart friend Tom Murphy so frequently says, ”You can always tell the man off tomorrow, if it is such a good idea.”
Influence-From-Mere-Association Tendency
Antidotes
● Carefully examine each past success, looking for accidental, noncausative factors associated with such success that will tend to mislead as one appraises odds implicit in a proposed new undertaking.
● Look for dangerous aspects of the new undertaking that were not present when past success occurred.
● Don’t shoot the messenger make a habit of welcoming bad news to counter this tendency! “Always tell us the bad news promptly. It is only the good news that can wait.” common injunction at Berkshire
Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial
Antidote
● Don’t resolve cognitive dissonance by distorting reality in order to make you feel better. Find a way to always keep yourself open to the facts of any situation so you can make the most sound choices.
Excessive Self-Regard Tendency
Antidotes
● “Excesses of self regard often cause bad hiring decisions because employers grossly over appraise the worth of their own conclusions that rely on impressions in face-to-face contact. The correct antidote to this sort of folly is to under weigh face-to- face impressions and over weigh the applicant’s past record.” Munger
● “The main institutional antidotes to this part of the “Tolstoy effect” are:
○ Offer meritocratic, demanding culture, plus personal handling methods that build up morale, and
○ Severance of the worst offenders.” Munger
● “The best antidote to folly from an excess of self regard is to force yourself to be more objective when you are thinking about yourself, your family and friends, your property, and the value of your past and future activity.”
● “Of all forms of useful pride, perhaps the most desirable is a justified pride in being trustworthy. Moreover, the trustworthy man, even after allowing for the inconveniences of his chosen course, ordinarily has a life that averages out better than he would have if he provided less reliability.” Munger
Over-Optimism Tendency
Antidotes
● “One standard antidote to foolish optimism is trained, habitual use of the simple probability math of Fermatand Pascal,taught in my youth to high school sophomores.” Munger
Deprival-Superreaction Tendency
Antidotes
● “One antidote to intense, deliberate maintenance of group think is an extreme culture of courtesy, kept in place despite ideological differences, like the behavior of the justices now serving on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Munger
● “Bring in able andarticulated is believers of incumbent group think. Successful corrective measures to evil examples of groupthink maintenance have included actions like that of Derek Bokwhen, as president of Harvard, he started disapproving tenure appointments proposed by ideologues at Harvard Law School.” Munger
● “One of the best antidotes to this folly is good poker skill learned young. The teaching value of poker demonstrates that not all effective teaching occurs on a standard academic path.” Munger
Social-Proof Tendency
We are wired to make a huge number of decisions in our life based purely on other people’s actions. The effect is so strong that even if we are surrounded by a small group of people who insist that blue is green, then we’ll question our own reality.
Antidotes
● “Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.” Munger
● “Because both bad and good behavior are made contagious by Social Proof Tendency, it is highly important that human societies:
○ Stop any bad behavior before it spreads.
○ Foster and display all good behavior.
