The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain
> Date: August 6, 2018 6:36:20 JST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain
> Science suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?
> By BEN YAGODA
> Sep 2018 Issue
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/cognitive-bias/565775/>
>
> I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the 
> twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people 
> have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. 
> A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.
>
> Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one 
> month, people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move—which is easy to 
> recognize when the question is thrust away from the present. Asked whether they would take $150 a year from now or 
> $180 in 13 months, people are overwhelmingly willing to wait an extra month for the extra $30.
>
> Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, 
> people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on 
> expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they 
> contribute.
>
> That state of affairs led a scholar named Hal Hershfield to play around with photographs. Hershfield is a marketing 
> professor at UCLA whose research starts from the idea that people are “estranged” from their future self. As a 
> result, he explained in a 2011 paper, “saving is like a choice between spending money today or giving it to a 
> stranger years from now.” The paper described an attempt by Hershfield and several colleagues to modify that state of 
> mind in their students. They had the students observe, for a minute or so, virtual-reality avatars showing what they 
> would look like at age 70. Then they asked the students what they would do if they unexpectedly came into $1,000. The 
> students who had looked their older self in the eye said they would put an average of $172 into a retirement account. 
> That’s more than double the amount that would have been invested by members of the control group, who were willing to 
> sock away an average of only $80.
>
> I am already old—in my early 60s, if you must know—so Hershfield furnished me not only with an image of myself in my 
> 80s (complete with age spots, an exorbitantly asymmetrical face, and wrinkles as deep as a Manhattan pothole) but 
> also with an image of my daughter as she’ll look decades from now. What this did, he explained, was make me ask 
> myself, How will I feel toward the end of my life if my offspring are not taken care of?
>
> When people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that 
> slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of 
> cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The 
> collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the 
> tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and 
> underemphasize the influence of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite”) to 
> the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”).
>
> Some of the 185 are dubious or trivial. The ikea effect, for instance, is defined as “the tendency for people to 
> place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.” And others closely 
> resemble one another to the point of redundancy. But a solid group of 100 or so biases has been repeatedly shown to 
> exist, and can make a hash of our lives.
>
> The gambler’s fallacy makes us absolutely certain that, if a coin has landed heads up five times in a row, it’s more 
> likely to land tails up the sixth time. In fact, the odds are still 50-50. Optimism bias leads us to consistently 
> underestimate the costs and the duration of basically every project we undertake. Availability bias makes us think 
> that, say, traveling by plane is more dangerous than traveling by car. (Images of plane crashes are more vivid and 
> dramatic in our memory and imagination, and hence more available to our consciousness.)
>
> [snip]
>
>
>
>
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