3 Mental Mistakes Holding You Back From The Success You Deserve
Most people have made a few bad choices during their lifetime — I’m certainly no exception.
But why is that?
I mean I consider myself a reasonably smart guy, who can read and write and add and subtract. But even so, I’ve made some incredibly stupid decisions over the years.
For instance, I went to school and studied the science of religion, because I had six months where I thought that was cool, even though I’m much more of a quantitative guy — I eventually wound up with a degree in behavioural economics.
My point is that from time to time we all make decisions that make absolutely zero sense when we look back up in them.
This purpose of this article is to explore some of the reasons why smart people make bad decisions.
So without further ado, I give to you:
1. Facts don’t change your mind
Confirmation bias is the tendency to only look for evidence that confirms our ideas.
We are all susceptible to confirmation bias, and it affects us, when we’re deciding to start a new business (Baack et. al. 2015), when we’re watching the news (Genzkow et. al. 2014) and in life in general (Nickerson 1998).
To add insult to injury — most of us are affected by it, way more than we’d like to believe.
Keeping an open mind isn’t easy, but if we only look for evidence that confirms our ideas, we are never going to come up with anything new. We won’t be able to think creatively, and we won’t be able to do our best work (Mitschell & Nicholas 2006).
If you want to make smarter decision, you need to get better at recognizing when you are suffering from the confirmation bias, and correct your beliefs accordingly.
This is easier said than done though, but it is necessary if we want to improve our thinking.
To get a sense of just how persistent I’ve shamelessly stolen this example from the New Yorker.
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine — they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office — the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right.
At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well — significantly better than the average student — even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student — a conclusion that was equally unfounded.
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
If we want to avoid this type of thinking, we can take cue from science.
In order to avoid the confirmation bias we can actively look for ways to disprove our current ideas.
This means that we can actively seek out information and news that we disagree with, get other angles on matters that we feel opinionated towards and find ways in which we are wrong.
If we can’t prove we are wrong, then we must be right, and we will have thought of most of the angles, but more often we will find that we can get a more nuanced view of life if we keep an open mind, and seek to find out where the weak spots in our thinking is.
When we do this, we keep an open mind, and eliminate — at least partially — this particular brain fart.
2. You think everything will be fine
One of the world’s leading scientists in the area of the optimism bias is Tali Sharot, and she writes the following:
“Humans, do not hold a positivity bias on account of having read too many self-help books. Rather, optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our most complex organ, the brain.
From modern-day financial analysts to world leaders, newlyweds, the Los Angeles Lakers, and even birds, optimism biases human and nonhuman thought. It takes rational reasoning hostage, directing our expectations toward a better outcome without sufficient evidence to support such a conclusion.
It’s not difficult to see how this might lead to us making some bad choices. We are literally hard-wired to believe that everything will be fine, which means that we refrain from planning as thoroughly as we should, we take insignificant pre-cautions and maybe we’re not insured as well as we should be, because we think that everything will be fine.
The stoics had a great method for getting around this — something they called Premeditatio Malorum — or pre-meditation of evils.
They would literally sit down and imagine everything that could go wrong, and plan accordingly.
This is a great way to circumvent the Optimism bias and the negative effects it can have on our decision making, and we should can use it to our benefit, whenever we have to make an important decision.
3. Your perspective is distorted by the frame
Some of the most brilliant science in the 20th century was conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. One of their groundbreaking discoveries was how framing affects our decision making.
They found our choices are affected by how we look at a problem (Kahneman & Tversky 1981).
To illustrate how framing affects our lives, I want you to look at the following example from Psychology Today:
A thought experiment: Let’s assume you represent America in negotiations with me. I offer you a deal: I’ll give you a technological invention, a breakthrough that will increase the country’s wealth, make us more efficient, more productive, and make our lives much more fun. The only thing I want in return is that you let me swoop in every year, take 40,000 people at random and kill them. Do you take the deal? If you said no, then you’re a bit too late. Because in fact, you have already taken the deal. It’s your car. Now that you see it from this perspective, are you willing to give up your car?
Or if we want to pick another very hot button, let’s look at how we’ve framed our discussion of what’s going on with the environment — from Psychologenie.com:
Media is very effective in using framing techniques to divert or grab the attention of viewers. One of the examples that can be mentioned is the change of the word ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’. It has been stated that such a change was made for political reasons, since apparently, the word ‘climate change’ is less scary than its counterpart. Of course. scientifically, the meaning of both the terms is different. However, such a speculation in the media certainly created different ‘frames’ towards the approach of this sensitive issue.
Like most problems in life, the simple process of realizing there is an issue, is the first step to resolving it. So it is with framing as well.
When we are aware, that the way ideas and thoughts are presented affect us, we can overcome it. Conversely, once we know how effective framing is, we can also look at the way we present our own thoughts and ideas and how we can make them more interesting and effective by the way we frame them.
Final Thoughts
Our thinking is affected in a myriad of ways, and the three issues outlined above are far from an exhaustive list.
Becoming aware of them however, is the first step in overcoming them, which enables us to make better decision.
When you make better decisions your life gets better.
Start making better decisions today.
