You are Not So Smart by David McRaney

“When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on, it is called priming.“.

Lots of things use priming like:

• Business/Advertising: Seeing a certain brand of soda repeatedly in movies or TV shows can make you more likely to choose that brand when you’re thirsty. Upbeat music in a store can create a sense of excitement and encourage impulsive buying.
• Social contexts: Being reminded of a negative stereotype about your group (e.g., women are bad at math) can negatively impact your performance on a math test, even if you don’t consciously believe the stereotype.
• Word Association: If you see the word “doctor,” you’re more likely to quickly recognize related words like “nurse” or “hospital.”

You can only be primed if you’re not paying attention, if you’re paying attention then you will catch the attempt. Ergo, you cannot self-prime, not immediately at least.

There are two parts (in this context) of your brain – rational and emotional.

• Priming works on the emotional part.
• The emotional part is active when you’ve flooded with inputs that the rational mind cannot make sense of (it is limited because it can only hold “four to nine bits of information” at a time).

The author makes an important point that lots of people’s jobs – esp. in marketing – depend on how well they can prime you. That is why remain skeptical when you interact with someone who can potentially sell you something – basically, almost the entire world.

We’re story tellers, so when we’re a subject of priming we’ll cook up stories to explain away the event. Like if you’re made to smell freshly baked bread as you enter a food store you’ll end up buying more and when asked why you bought more than average you’ll come up with something like “oh, its important for one to have proper nutrition.”.

And it evolved in humans for a good reason:

• Rapid Pattern Recognition and Prediction: Priming allows us to use prior experiences and associations to rapidly interpret new stimuli and anticipate potential outcomes. This facilitates quick decision-making, especially in situations where deliberation could be costly or dangerous.

• Social Learning and Adaptation: Priming plays a role in social learning, enabling us to quickly pick up on social cues, norms, and behaviours from others.

So, it’s not going away anytime soon. Therefore …

Have the environment where you spend most of your time packed with cues of stuff that you want to turn into habits.

Like having posters of bodybuilders and athletes in your home office, or running shoes by the door if you want to building the habit of hitting the gym after your work day.

Usually, you need to ensure that you’re making decisions from the rational part of your brain.

So if you’re at the cusp of committing to a long term, hard/impossible to reverse decision then quadruple check for priming and ensure your decision is based on logic, rationality and wisdom.

Like the decision to get botox injects is better made with family who do not judge you for your looks than in the dance club or the cosmetic surgeon’s office.

“Just as the brain fills in your blind spot every moment of the day without your consciously noticing, so do you fill in the blind spots in your memory and your reasoning.“.

Not only is your memory a habitual liar, your mind is also a compulsive story teller.

It loves telling stories to the point that it will force fit stories where there isn’t a need.

The author gives the example of split-brain confabulation patients whose left hand might act in a way that seems contrary to the patient’s intentions, such as unbuttoning a shirt while the right hand is buttoning it.

The patient might then confabulate an explanation, like “I was just checking if the buttons were loose.”.

Patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome will tell you they had a late work meeting last night when in reality they’ve been in the hospital ward for a month.

People with anosognosia will tell you that they won’t pick up the cookie because have to watch their weight when in reality they’re paralysed.

A person with Capgras delusion will believe that their close friends and family have all been replaced by imposters.

Someone with Cotard’s syndrome believe they’re dead.

That these people behave this way is interesting, but what is really interesting is that they are not lying really, truly believe what they’re saying, their minds making up stories in real time and completely unaware of the real condition that afflicts them.

But you need not have your corpus callosum severed to be start making up these stories.

And the thing about these stories is that you don’t know they’re stories, so you believe them to be literal truths.

That is what makes life hard (or entertaining depending on the way you look at it).

So, don’t take people’s (or your own) recounting of experiences literally, they may be inventing the details without even knowing about it.

When something they say sounds improbable or when a lot is at stake at getting things right, that is when you need to corroborate the statements.

Everyone knows what this is, at least I’d imagine patrons of Sunchaser would.

It’s when you look for data that confirms your existing beliefs and ignore/poke holes in evidence to the contrary.

A case of selective attention. When it comes to biases, confirmation bias is the OG.

“If you are thinking about buying a particular make of new car, you suddenly see people driving that car all over the roads. If you just ended a longtime relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see babies everywhere.“.

When people start doing this deliberately it becomes the confirmation bias.

That is, cherry picking evidence to support whatever they believe in.

“Remember, there’s always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to advertisers by offering a guaranteed audience of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are in that audience.“.

The frequency illusion is when you notice something everywhere after learning about it, making you think it’s suddenly more common, even though it’s always been there, just hiding in plain sight.

You rewrite your memories to confirm to things you now know are true.

So be careful around people who claim their predictions are always right – they’re probably using hindsight bias without realising it.

Had some inclination that the food was spoiled? Maybe 20%?

And when the food gives you diarrhoea: “I 100% knew the pizza was stale all along! aaargh!!”.

Well, if you knew for certain it was stale then you wouldn’t have had it, would you? This means you did not know it was stale and are fooling yourself into thinking you did.

You assume the data/examples you can easily recall is an accurate representation of reality hence decisions taken from them are robust.

Like when you decide to but a well advertised product because you can recall the brand easily compared to others that may be better value for money but whose names you do not remember.

“You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.“.

You cherry pick data to support your hypothesis or change your hypothesis to match the data or generally find patterns/significance in data when there is none.

And in this world where so many millions of things are happening if you really are determined to find data that fits into the patterns of what you’re trying to prove, you will.

That is why you need to form your hypothesis before you start the experiment, have an understanding of p-values and be sure the values you take are evidence backed.

Its hallmark is that hypothesis are made after the data is observed.

“You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all.“.

Being penny wise but pound foolish.

Sacrificing the long term for the short term. You will choose to get something right now than wait for it even if what you get after the wait is objectively better.

Since most good things in life involve waiting patiently (and doing the work) we’d rather choose the more immediate gratification.

You’d also have noticed that things giving immediate gratification are usually bad for us over the long term (junk food, social media, porn).

This is why everyone makes grand plans every new year but when it comes time to choose between the long term wait for the reward (hit the gym) or the immediate gratification (sit at home and watch TV) we choose the latter.

“Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up chocolate and go deeply into debt.“.

There is some nuance to this – present bias often involves hyperbolic discounting – which means if we have to wait, we’d rather wait longer if the extra reward is not objectively justified.

Like if you’re given a choice between getting a million rupees in five years or getting Rs. 50000 extra if you wait another year (i.e. total six years) you’d choose the latter even though objectively you’re more likely to earn more than 50 grand if you took the million and invested it in a fixed deposit.

I don’t know if this is always true but I guess it’d be true when the pay off isn’t so easily judged numerically.

Underestimating climate change may be the biggest collective normalcy bias all of us are being deluded by.

That is, we think things are going to continue being hunky dory and ignore the warning signs as noise.

“In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or a towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all. You will float away and leave a senseless statue in your place. You may even lie down. If no one comes to your aid, you will die.“.

To be fair to those who get caught in the middle of immediate disaster, like those who were on those flights in Tenerife, it is natural to go into fear brachycardia (i.e freeze and not act) which is an evolutionary tactic that attempts to limit motion to become “invisible” to predators.

It’s more about situations that give you reasonable time to act, if nothing then to buy time at least.

Normalcy bias exists because if it didn’t we’d be freaking out all the time, and truth is, life is pretty normal most times.

Prepare, prepare even if it seems it will never happen – “… sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time.” – and if you see yourself ignoring warnings esp. if they’re coming from people who have done their homework remember you may be falling prey to normalcy bias.

“Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion.“.

Remember how the mind loves stories and how you are so enamoured by them that you don’t even realise it’s a story?

Introspection illusion is a result of that. “You look at what you did, or how you felt, and you make up some sort of explanation that you can reasonably believe.“.

You think you know the reason you do things and that you’re life is an intelligently and deliberately curated list of actions but in truth you’re doing several things you have no real idea why but with a nice story layered atop by your mind fool yourself into thinking you do.

You think someone else will do something so you take no action.

That is why people who get injured in a park with very few people are likely see someone come to their help than those who get injured on a busy street.

The effect if stronger if you think the person who needs help knows the person who is harming them.

The good news is, when someone beaks the effect, that is, goes to help, everyone else starts helping too. So nice.

This means you must be the one who takes action. Lead by example.

The less you know about something the more cocksure you are about it, generally.

This effect applies to commonplace things in life like sewing a button or making cheese from milk, and not the really complicated stuff like heart surgery or running a nuclear power plant – in those areas if you do not know then you know you don’t know.

But still, we all got egos and we got a mind that likes to dumb things down for us (heuristics, coming up later) – so we fall prey to this effect soon when start learning about something new and start to think its not that hard after all/there’s nothing much to it (while in reality we haven’t come across the hard stuff/the masters yet).

So, be humble, there is a lot that you don’t know.

“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” – Bertrand Russell

You mistake coincidences for something more and think the random alignment of things has a deeper, perhaps divinely ordained, meaning. Basis that you take action.

It need not always be a bad thing, if you take the “signs” to mean that you need to make a positive change in your life then all the power to you.

“More often than not, apophenia is the result of the most dependable of all delusions—the confirmation bias. You see what you want to see and ignore the rest.“.

The author points out that this spontaneous ordering of seemingly random things is not so random after all.

There are so many things happening all around us that by sheer force of numbers even highly improbable events will happen quote regularly in our lives; like once a month, read Littlewood’s law.

You see, all this marketing and branding is really a way to make us feel inadequate until we buy whatever is being sold.

And when we have a choice of what to buy and the company selling it has done a good job at marketing, we’ll not only buy their thing because its a good value, but also because that thing fits into the life story we want to believe in.

“I bought the iPhone not because it makes me feel sophisticated and project a certain image but because it had a great display.” – Yeah, maybe you did buy it for the specs, but I’m pretty sure you also bought it for the story.

We live in stories, most of us and brands know that, so they exploit it.

But it’s not just the brands, the politicians and the religious leaders too.

Endowment effect

You ascribe higher value to the something you own than you’d have to the same thing had you not owned it.

Sunk cost fallacy

Just because you have already invested some time, effort, money into something you think it is sufficient reason to continue with the investment.

Choice supportive bias

You view your past choices with more favourability than they deserve. As a way to reduce anxiety about whether you did the optimal thing.

Just because someone is an expert on something does not make them an expert on all things.

But our minds do not realise that and this is why we take “advice” from well known people on areas they have no business giving advice in.

Once again, our friends in advertising are well aware of this bias and often exploit it by using celebrities or other well-known figures to endorse products or services, even if they have no relevant expertise.

“If you feel more inclined to believe something is true because it comes from a person with prestige, you are letting the argument from authority spin your head.“.

Just because something can have more than one probably cause, does not mean that all causes are equally probable.

You’d want to link this with Occam’s razor that states that we should go for the explanation that makes the least assumptions and leaps of faith.

The straw man distracts from the real issue at hand by focusing on a misrepresented and easier-to-attack version of the opponent’s argument.

Just like its easy to kick the ass of a man made out of straw, it is easy to defeat an argument that you misrepresent.

“oh, so what you’re saying is …”, “so you mean …”, “so what you mean is …”, “everyone knows …” – When someone starts their sentence with something like this be on guard for a straw man coming your way.

Slippery slope fallacy is a close cousin of the Straw man where an extreme, dystopian version of your argument is presented by the opponent.

“Oh, so you want to play cards with your friends eh? What then? Poker? Gambling? Drugs? Prison? Eh? EH??!!”.

No point for guessing where both straw man and slippery slope are used a lot – politics.

It means “To the person” – Your argument is directed to the person and not their argument.

“Your argument is wrong because you are ugly.” or “You are not in a position call the food undercooked given you can’t even boil water.”.

Like the others in this list this evolved for a pretty good reason: people who are known to be stupid/evil/shrewd/liars and so on are not to be trusted, so their arguments should not be entertained.

Unfortunately, that line of thinking is unscientific – even a bank robber can hold the answers to universe.

I’m not saying he will, but he can, and then remember argument from ignorance (above) – just because he can does not mean there is a high chance he would, so while you should remain open to argument but be able to exercise intelligent judgement.

People who have it bad deserve it somehow, it’s karma. “You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.“.

In reality, the world is not fair. Bad things happen good people. Bad people get away with murder.

When you judge someone downtrodden and think they deserve it you are “ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.“.

Yes, it is true that bad decisions will often lead to bad outcomes.

But there are countless examples of people trying their best and still getting hammered by the vagaries of fate.

So, be kind and help people out if you can safely, do not assume just because they’ve fallen on evil times that they deserve them.

A public good is one where your use does not prevent others access to it (“non-excludable”) or diminish their ability to use it (“non-rivalrous”).

Like a public park, or roads. Public goods are such that everyone contributes to (via taxes and such) and has equal access to – and so the rational actor would contribute very little but be able to enjoy a lot.

That is why people who have luxury cars (that is, no dearth of money) will cheat on their taxes – their cheating does not harm them directly (at the level of a nation, the tax dollars they did not give get lost in the noise, so its hard to pinpoint “this road did not get built because I cheated on my taxes”) while their access to public goods is unimpeded.

When one person starts cheating in the public goods game, others are tempted (or pissed off at the cheaters) and so the cheating (a.k.a. free riding) spreads.

“One misguided exploiter can crash the system. Greed is contagious.“.

If cheaters go unpunished the economy flounders and the nation suffers.

If the cheaters are swiftly (and publicly) punished (like fines and jain terms) the cheating stops.

Some nations have done this well like Singapore.

Fairness matters more to you than pure reason.

The preference for fairness might have evolved as a mechanism for promoting cooperation and social cohesion.

Individuals who are perceived as fair and cooperative are more likely to be trusted and engaged in mutually beneficial interactions.

“You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.“.

You are far more vulnerable to manipulation when the topic of discussion is you.

If the statement is ambiguous but does a good job of making you think it’s about you somehow, you will get rid of ambiguity by finding ways to make the statement match with your traits.

People use this all the time, people like advertisers (yes, they exploit almost all of our biases), astrologers, tarot card readers, horoscope makers, fortune tellers.

Humans as social creatures want to be part of the in-group.

They don’t want to be seen as too divergent (unless they’re teenagers but that’s a different age).

“It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment.“.

So they’re judging whether to speak up or stay quiet at every group interaction – if their position is secure and/or the issue at hand does not directly impact them they’ll stay quiet, if their position is insecure and/or the issue at hand does directly impact them they’ll speak up.

Often when people in power meet for a group discussion chaired by a boss of some kind you’ll see group think – that is the group becomes an echo chamber for the boss (or his lackeys) and reaches a false/imagined consensus.

Things get even more complicated if in the group discussion is someone with greater authority (like a boss, or a chief minister) whom you don’t want to rub the wrong way.

So, if you want your group to reach better decisions firmly, logically and with good intentions be the asshole and speak up where there is need.

For the longest time humans saw the below average version of everything. Food, shelter, mates.

Then came the industrial revolution, the green revolution, the internet, botox, silicone implants, food engineering and many other things that showed us the off-the-charts versions of food, shelter, mates.

This sent (and continues to send) our monkeys brains into overdrive as we gorge on junk food, buy 8 bedroom houses for two people and keep porn stars in business.

People who exhibit or “release” super stimuli are called supernormal releasers.

Indeed when you hear people complaining about the excesses of modern life, they’re really complaining about the prevalence of these super stimuli and their negative impact on humans who don’t know any better.

But you do, so remember “When a stimulus goes from good to great, it does not mean it truly is better than the normal version.“.

“Probability be damned, I’m going with my gut.”.

Basically our emotional mind plays a large part in determining our lives no matter how rational we might think ourselves to be.

First impressions may not be last impressions but they are certainly very difficult to change once you’ve made up your mind. And your emotional brain quickly assesses a new situation and decides fast.

Read the fascinating case of Elliot the patient – This tells us: when emotion is impaired, so is decisions making.

That is why the affect heuristic is important and why you learn how to think with your gut far earlier than you learn how to think with your brain.

The world is a smorgasbord of choices and the purely rational brain will simply not be able to come to a decision on the most basic of things because of the sheet number of variables and the interactions between them.

Even if you have the faster super computer it is impossible to optimise even the most inconsequential of things like “should I buy the apple or banana?”.

Affect heuristic evolved so that we were not standing around weighing the evidence whether the lion looked hungry and instead were running for our lives.

Fortunately, not a lot of lions around these day. But a whole lot of advertisers and politicians, who hack our emotional brains for their ends.

Advertisers craft campaigns that evoke positive emotions, associating their products or brands with feelings of happiness, excitement, or belonging.

This positive emotional response can make us more likely to choose their products, even if there’s no logical reason to prefer them over others.

Some ads play on our fears and insecurities, creating a sense of urgency or anxiety that can drive us to purchase products or services we might not need.

Protect yourself by developing media literacy and critical thinking.

Politicians often use emotionally charged language and imagery to sway public opinion, framing issues in ways that evoke fear, anger, or patriotism.

They may use divisive rhetoric (“us vs them”) to create an “in-group” and an “out-group,” fostering a sense of loyalty and belonging among their supporters.

You can maintain stable, meaningful relationships with about 100 to 230 people (though in my case it seems to be significantly lesser).

Its not a memory problem but a processing problem, our Neo-cortices can only process upto a maximum of 200ish direct, active relationships before getting bogged down.

“People who use the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing are fooling themselves. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret only with a handful of true friends.“.

Nothing says “I am against capitalism” than buying stuff that says “I am against capitalism”. See the irony here?

“It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.“.

Once upon a time our value to society was signalled through what we could do – like chop more trees, sew sturdier garments, forge stronger weapons, build better houses, make sturdier shoes. So one’s work was one’s offering to society, the reason to be kept in one and thus a strong part of one’s identity.

More recently however (with the industrial revolution and specialisation of labour) our value to society in terms of what we could do was, if not diminished, obfuscated. After all, “I punch numbers in an excel sheet and make sure the sums are accurate” is way weaker than “I am the dairy farmer of my village, I provide nutritious milk to my people”.

So how do we get back our identities? One way, capitalism/consumerism will tell us, is with the things we have.

If you have a Mercedes then you are someone who matters. No surprise therefore, increasingly today we try to signal our value to society with what we own.

And what if your station in life is such that it does afford you the ownership of many things?

Capitalism/consumerism will tell you: “Well, worry not – if you can’t out-consume your peers, out-taste them!”

“Your friends may all be mindless zombies but you, no, you are an individual with taste – what you buy – that is special, that is considered, that is curated, that means something – and you, you stand for something.”.

That is why what is cool and what is not is forever changing. And this is good news for advertisers, the author puts it well: “Competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism.“.

So next time you find yourself feeling smug buying the boutique, organic, made in small batches, and thinking yourself above those sheeple – be careful, you may be selling out without even realising it.

“My failures are because the world is unfair and random, but my successes, they’re all my hard work you see.”

“You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.“.

You think a lot of people are noticing you, but in reality, they’re not.

You think if you buy that expensive watch, designer clothing or fast car, then a lot more people will notice you and like you.

But the truth is hardly anyone does. They might notice what you have, and then they will imagine how they would look if they had what you had, but you can rest assured that they are not noticing you and how cool you are.

“The next time you get a pimple on your forehead, or buy a new pair of shoes, or Tweet about how boring your day is, don’t expect anyone to notice. You are not so smart or special.“.

“I am concerned about the state of the world, all these negative, hateful, provocative messages being sent every day – I am too smart for them – But there are a lot of morons out there who’ll take those messages to heart and do something bad.”.

“The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.“.

Blowing off steam by punching a bag, screaming into a billow, hitting the gym does not reduce anger, it sustains it.

A better way is to instead cool down, count to ten, distract yourself with something that reduces anger.

Your memory is a habitual liar. “… hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become spanners, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth.“.

Many things in our society rely on the infallibility of memory: eyewitness testimony to a crime, customer preferences in product surveys, trauma recall, self-reported patient histories, historical accounts/oral traditions and so on.

A distinction must be made, humans can have very good memory when they want to – like a surgeon remembering all the steps to the intricate procedure – but most times in life we’re not I situations where a lapse in memory would be catastrophic, that is why people don’t pay much attention to what is going on and let their minds fill in the gaps with imagined details.

Read about the fascinating experiments by Elizabeth Loftus.

“… memories aren’t recorded like videos or stored like data on a hard drive. They are constructed and assembled on the spot … Each time … you make it from scratch … if … time has passed … good chance of getting … big things wrong.“.

So, write important things down as close to when they happened/are happening. Take your memories with a gran of salt.

Your desire to fit in and not disobey authority can make you do very stupid things.

Read about the Milgram experiment.

“To truly refuse to conform to the norms of your culture and the laws of the land would be a daunting exercise in futility. You may not agree with the zeitgeist, but you know conformity is part of the game of life. Chances are, you pick your battles and let a lot of things slide.“.

The thing about conformity is that you’re mostly not aware you are doing it. That is why nonconformity is such a big deal and stands out, because your mind does even register the far more prevent cases of conformity.

Our desire for conformity has evolutionary underpinnings/benefits.

Which means you are designed to conform by default, and bad actors can take advantage of this.

So, “Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others.“.

Your habits are hard to break because when you start something new and the old habits start to fade away they will unleash one last salvo to bring you back to them.

And the bigger/stronger the reward your old habit used to give you the greater its effort to resurrect itself before it finally dies.

When your repeated efforts to fix a bad situation did not work, you just accepted it as a fact of life and stopped trying. Read about Seligman’s experiments on dogs.

Why do we give up after repeat failure – one theory is that the body sees that the effort is not yielding result but is consuming resources, so in effect a net negative situation that it decides it’d be better to not do anything

Fortunately for you there are countless examples of people who faced impossible odds but because of their tenacity were able to even them.

You too must not use the possibility of failure as an excuse to not try.

It is not certain whether you’ll succeed if you try, but it is certain that you will fail if you won’t.

Even if you are certain of failure, at least fail while daring greatly. That is what defines a good life; not the result but the effort.

The mind is not solely confined to the brain, but rather emerges from the dynamic interaction between the brain, body, and environment. What you feel changes what you think, and also what you think changes what you feel.

Which means you can be manipulated into thinking and acting differently if the room is too hot/cold, if the place smells nice/not, whether the chair you sit on has a cushion or hard wood, if they offer you a complimentary hot beverage or cold drink and so on. Marketers are in on this, read about neuromarketing.

It is a form of priming where an initial piece of information (“anchor”) influences your subsequent decisions.

Anchors can be relevant (customer ratings on Google Maps) or irrelevant (random numbers) – both will influence your decision making.

Anchors are common like:

• Your current salary serves as an anchor in your next salary negotiation.
• MSRP of a product serves as an anchor influencing consumers’ perception of its value and their willingness to pay a certain price.
• The initial listing price of a house doesn’t necessarily reflect the true market value but sets a reference point that influences buyers’ and sellers’ expectations.

This persuasion technique involves making an initial, large request that is likely to be rejected, followed by a smaller, more reasonable request.

The initial, large request acts as an irrelevant anchor, making the subsequent request seem more acceptable in comparison.

So, when someone gives you information before asking you for a decision, ask yourself whether that information is even valid for the context or if they may have a motivation to anchor you.

Whereas when you are the one giving information and expecting a decision, know that you have the power to set an anchor.

You focus on something so intently that the rest of the scene is “invisible” to you even if it might be in front of your eyes.

You fail to notice changes in your visual environment, even if looking directly at them, because your attention is limited, and you tend to focus on specific aspects of the scene while filtering out others.

Brief interruptions or gradual changes can further hinder your ability to detect these changes. Read about the door study and the card experiment.

Related to learned helplessness but in this case instead of using your past experiences as an excuse for not acting today you make up an excuse to not act because the task is nothing like you’ve seen before.

Why? So that when you fail (which you expect to) your self-esteem is protected.

Men will self-handicap more than women.

You will self-handicap more when your life is going good and/or when your self-worth is intrinsically tied to your “performance” in the outside world. “Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.“.

You will make something that is initially not true, true, by acting in a way as if it were true.

It starts with a belief or expectation about the future, which may or may not be based on accurate information or evidence.

This belief influences our actions and behaviours, often unconsciously – we start acting in ways that align with our belief.

These actions then shape the situation in a way that ultimately brings about the expected outcome, confirming the initial belief, even if it was originally false.

Example: You believe you’re going to fail an upcoming exam. This belief leads you to feel anxious and demotivated, causing you to study less effectively. As a result, you perform poorly on the exam, confirming your initial belief of failure.

It is linked to hindsight bias in that you start expecting things to happen without really basing them on reason or observations.

Then you through your actions based on that belief make the expectation come true. Then you think you “knew it all along” and fancy yourself somewhat of a predicting expert.

This can lead to bad outcomes as you start being more cocksure in more areas of your life and taking decisions without really consulting data or considering alternative viewpoints.

Of course nothing is guaranteed in life and just because you expect something to happen does not make the odds anymore likely, but using the self fulfilling prophecy to your advantage by imagining a future where your endeavour yields result is a pleasant way to go about life.

The experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self is the one that experiences life in real time. The remembering self remembers your experiences.

Your experiencing self lives in the present and just wants to have fun. It does not concern itself with the future. It wants you to have the cheeseburger.

Your remembering self concerns itself with the future and wants to remember life as a meaningful story as it sits besides the fire, blanket on lap. It wants you to watch your weight.

The experiencing self is rooted in our primal instincts, while the remembering self represents our more evolved, conscious mind. This, let’s call it tug of war, between the experiencing and remembering self leads to things like:

1. Balancing the short term with the long term: We often struggle to balance the desires of our experiencing self with the aspirations of our remembering self. This can manifest in various areas of life, from dietary choices and exercise habits to financial decisions and career paths.
2. Regret and Self-Criticism: When we succumb to the temptations of the experiencing self, the remembering self might later criticise us for those choices, leading to feelings of regret or guilt.
3. A good life is lived in a way that balances the needs of both – like choosing a job you love doing and that helps you put aside money for retirement or if you have to eat a cheeseburger then having it with your child and seeing the joy on their face.

Again a sort of version of the affect heuristic. It’s when you ignore the probabilities and judge the likelihood of something belonging to a certain category based on how well it resembles a typical member of that category.

Read lessons from Thinking, Fast and Slow – there’s an experiment by Kahneman that demonstrates exactly this.

A famous example goes like: Rita is an extrovert who likes to spend her weekends travelling to off-beat locations.

People mistakenly believe that the probability of two events happening together (in conjunction) is higher than the probability of one of those events happening alone.

Quick to make friends, Rita will hitch a ride to anywhere and try out new experiences like pottery and woodworking.

She owns an eclectic collection of trinkets and jewellery from various cultures and in her free time will paint famous monuments from different nations.

Is it more likely that Rita is a doctor or that she is a well-traveled doctor?

You believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or too complex to control.

Basically you think you control a lot more about your life than you really do.

Those who hold power as especially susceptible to this. “Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country.“.

You think previous outcomes influence future outcomes in a non-Bayesian games.

A story to illustrate: Rajiv loved playing the lottery.

Every week, he’d carefully choose his numbers, convinced this time would be different.

He’d shake the ticket before the draw, believing it increased his chances.

One day, Rajiv won a small prize.

He felt elated, attributing it to his “lucky ritual” of shaking the ticket.

From then on, he religiously shook every ticket, convinced he had a system.

He even started advising friends on their number choices.

Years passed, and Rajiv continued to play, pouring more money into the lottery.

He never won big again, but the occasional small win reinforced his belief in his control over the outcome.

The truth was, each lottery draw was random.

Shaking the ticket or carefully choosing numbers had no impact on the odds.

Rajiv’s initial win was pure chance, but the illusion of control kept him playing, chasing an outcome he couldn’t influence.

Other’s behaviour is a reflection of their character. But my behaviour doesn’t say anything about my character.

Sort of like the illusion of control but its now about the other person: you expect them to have control over the situation so any failing is what they’ve deliberately decided to mess up, a character flaw.

“When a man believes the stripper reality likes him, or when the boss thinks all his employees love to hear his stories about fishing in Costa Rica, that’s the fundamental attribution error.“.

Read about the Stanford Prison Experiment and realise the tremendous power that setting, location, position, station, props, clothing, titles and so much more that is completely external and indeed, to an extent, based on luck can have on our assessments of other people’s character.

And when we assess other’s characters as flawed then we’re willing to excuse a lot of bad that happen to them (whether done by us or others).

Links with the just world fallacy in the sense that you can imagine someone to be of bad character and then when they suffer/are made to suffer you think they deserved it.

When you don’t know much about a person, when you haven’t had a chance to get to know him or her, you have a tendency to turn the person into a character.