Human Nature & Judgment Flashcards
Bias from Incentives
Humans are highly responsive to incentives. This causes us to distort our thinking when it is in our own interest to do so. A wonderful example for this bias is a salesman truly believing that his product will improve the lives of its users. The fact that he has an incentive to sell the product distorts his own thinking.
Pavlovian Association / Conditioning
The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov discovered that dogs started salivating even before their food was presented to them. This was because they recognised a certain pattern in the way their owners prepared the food leading to them associating sounds an movements with food.
This teaches us that certain repeated stimuli occuring with an event will lead us to associate the two.
This explains why the smell of a good food makes our stomach growl, and the songs we hear remind us of special times when we heard them before.
Tendency to feel Envy and Jelousy
Humans have a tendency to feel envious who have more than they do and a desire “get what is theirs”. Envy and jelousy are strong enough to drive otherwise irrational behavior, but is as old as humanity itself.
As a result, we were all taught not to brag and even the world religions warn us about the dangers of these natural emotions. It’s important to account for this tendency and put into place protective measures to avoid negative concequences.
This is why Warren Buffet pays himself a ridiculously low salary, avoiding loss of employee morale.
Bias from Liking/Loving or Disliking/Hating
Based on past association, stereotyping, ideology, genetic influence, or direct experience, humans have a tendency to distort their thinking in favor of people or things that they like and against people or things they dislike. This tendency leads to overrating the things we like and underrating things we dislike, often missing crucial nuances in the process.
This explains why we prefer taking advice from, tend to agree more easily with, and are likely to ignore faults of people we like. In contrast, we hardly ever listen to or agree with people we dislike. This is why the influence of our friends, parents, lovers, and idols can be enormous and why network marketing is so successful.
Denial
This is a psychological defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is rejects a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept, insisting it’s not true despite the evidence. This is powerfully demonstrated in situations like war or drug abuse, where denial has powerful destructive effects but allows for behavioral inertia. Denying reality can be a coping mechanism, a survival mechanism, or a purposeful tactic.
Denial can be detrimental to our health or success as it makes us ignore reality and prevents action.
Availability Bias
One of the most useful findings of modern psychology is what Daniel Kahneman calls the Availability Bias or Heuristic: We tend to most easily recall what is salient, important, frequent, and recent. The brain has its own energy-saving and inertial tendencies that we have little control over making us disregard things that are not as available.
This explains why the importance of information and events that are recent is inflated compared to things of the past. Elements that seem important, are recent, and are tied to emotions have more influence on the way we think and behave. This is important to remember in order to avoid perceptive mistakes.
Halo & Horn Effect
The Halo & Horn effect is a cognitive bias that causes you to allow one trait, either good (halo) or bad (horn), to overshadow other traits, behaviors, actions, or beliefs.
E.g. Once a positive opinion of a person or product has been formed, positive interactions with that person or product are seen to reinforce that favorable opinion, but negative interactions and traits are often disregarded (Halo).
Conversely, a negative opionion based even on one single trait can make you completely disregard any other positives that might exist.
Emotional Contagion
/ Law of State Transference
Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in other people. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many different ways both implicitly or explicitly.
This can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one’s expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person. In the brain, so called “mirror neurons“ are respsonsible for this automatic synchronization.
Examples of this are when a presenter’s nervousness is transmitted and felt by the audience, when a cheerful and energetic person improves the mood and atmosphere of a room after entering, or when people yawn right after each other.
This concept is extremely powerful since you’re able to control others’ emotions by simply demonstrating them yourself.
