It was Friday and yet again, Roger, the security guard, watched with suspicion as Andrew left the worksite with his empty wheelbarrow.
Andrew worked in a pulp and paper mill as a welder.
Every Friday he would leave the pulp and paper mill pushing his empty wheelbarrow with an empty sack over it.
And every Friday as Andrew was leaving the site, Roger would ask Andrew what was under the sack.
“Nothing Roger,” was always the answer. Andrew would lift the sack to prove it.
Many years later Roger bumped into Andrew. “What were you up to all those years ago with your wheelbarrow on Fridays? I know you were doing something dodgy – I just never worked out what it was.”
Andrew looked at Roger with a wry smile, “I was stealing wheelbarrows.”
Roger was shocked. How come he couldn’t work it out?
Influenced by the diversion of the sack, he had a complete blind spot for the possibility that the wheelbarrow was being stolen.
And just like Roger had a blind spot for the theft of the wheelbarrow we all have a blind spot for the influence of cognitive biases on our decision-making.
What are cognitive biases?
Cognitive biases are the built-in ways we think that help or hinder our ability to make good and rational decisions.
They generally operate outside of our awareness and result in us making consistent reasoning errors that strongly influence our decisions.
To get a feel for what they are, let’s go over three of them:
1 – The Fundamental Attribution Bias
2 – The Confirmation bias
3 – The Gambler’s fallacy
Fundamental Attribution Bias
The Fundamental Attribution bias is our susceptibility to simultaneously believe two things when we observe someone’s negative behavior.
We have a fundamental bias that a person’s personality is the key reason for their negative behavior and their situation plays a little role in it.
When in reality it’s generally the situation that is the main contributor or a combination of their personality and the situation they are in.
For example, when a car in front of us cuts us off, we immediately attribute the driver’s behavior to arrogance and rudeness. However what actually caused it could be the role and power of their situation. The driver could have had a call from his pregnant wife who has just gone into labor. So he urgently had to get off the freeway to turn around to go back home. He wasn’t arrogant or rude, he was in an emergency situation.
The Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is noticing and favoring information that confirms our existing beliefs or biases and simultaneously disregarding information that goes against our beliefs or biases.
As Warren Buffet so elegantly put it: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”
For example, if you follow a sports team you’ll have a tendency to notice all the times the referee makes a ‘poor’ decision that goes against your team and tends to not notice the ‘poor’ decisions that go against the other team.
A supporter of the other team will have the opposite scenario. Both can’t be right – but because of the confirmation bias, both think they are.
It’s funny the way the brain works, which explains how we can easily get sucked in by the Gambler’s Fallacy
The Gambler’s Fallacy
The gambler’s fallacy is the susceptibility to believe that future probabilities are altered by past events when in reality they remain the same.
It’s a result of the misapplication of the Law of Large Numbers.
Every flip of a coin has the same chance of a head or a tail as the previous flip. The gambler’s fallacy comes because we know that if you flip a coin 100 times you should get 50 heads and 50 tails (on average). Where we make the mistake is applying that to the next flip where the odds are still 50/50 for that flip.
For example, You’ve flipped a coin nine times and it’s come up with tails 9 times in a row. The gambler’s fallacy would have us believe there is a much higher chance of the next flip being a ‘head.’
However, the chances of a head-turning up are still 50%, the same as the chance of a tail on the next flip.
I hope this information helps you see some of your own biases.
I have been blown away by what I have been learning about goal setting, in the past few weeks. It has shattered all my previous beliefs about what I can, or cannot achieve in life.
Last week I wrote that I am ditching setting goals and making lists about:
What experiences do I want to have this year?
How do I want to grow and develop this year?
What do I want to contribute to the world?
Those lists are now, not just limited to this year, but for life.
They are non-specific (specifying limits us), non-measurable (yet I will know when I reach them), non-achievable (they are big, and feel currently out of my reach), non-relevant (they don't align with my old values, which were limiting), and they are not time-bound. And yet I am already achieving many of them.
I am so excited by this newfound knowledge and experience that I want to share it with as many people as possible. The best way I have come up with is
to create an atomic course and make it available to everyone.
I am working on it.
The atomic course is going to be available in my Substack newsletter, to all my subscribers, on Wednesday 18, January.
I have been planning to create short courses for paid subscribers, which I will start doing this year. But the goal-setting course will be available to everyone.
That’s all from me this week.
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If you liked this newsletter, please subscribe to it.
Loved this post Neera, such a clever blend of a story about biases (‘you had me at wheelbarrow’) before the examples. And the fundamental attribution bias is absolutely top of my list for insidiousness.
I’m also very excited about your newly discovered ‘non-goals’ approach because I’ve always hated the way it makes me feel - that I’ve built my own mountain which I don’t want to climb. Look forward to hearing about the ‘atomic course’ - sounds like it will blow up my brain!
I too have "non goals". Instead of goals I think of my habits and behaviors that have worked well and strive to continue those. Then I think of habits and behaviors I want to cultivate more of and I name small daily things to do that creates those habits.
Loved this post!! Thanks again!