Brain Biases

What's a brain bias?

2010-11-22T09:51:00.001-08:00

Cognitive biases interrupt our ability to make rational decisions in our personal and financial lives.

We come into this world with a hidden repertoire of biases that seduce us into acting irrationally in a variety of common situations. By producing fast decisions and strong actions, these behaviors were adaptive, enabled us to survive in a hunter-gatherer environment. Most biases operate outside conscious awareness. The short articles that follow are mainly about identifying them. That's the hard part. But once a bias has been identified, correcting it is straightforward and mechanical. Each one becomes a point of inquiry. Cognitive biases are also called "effects," "errors," "fallacies," "glitches," and "illusions."

The biases are energy efficient: There's only so much information that can be analyzed by our brains before a cognitive load maximum is reached, and in the lead-up to that load, our critical-thinking faculties get sloppier. That's when mental short-cuts, like the brain biases, are useful. The history of "Cognitive Load Theory" can be traced back to the beginning of Cognitive Science and the work of G.A. Miller (1956). He was one of the first to suggest our working memory capacity was limited.

The Confirmation Bias

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The tendency to seek evidence that agrees with our position and dismiss evidence that does not.

Instinctively, most humans avoid evidence that contradicts their opinions. Contrary information is upsetting and confusing. We don't want to admit our beliefs may be wrong. Admitting to thinking errors feels like a put down. Wallowing in self-righteousness feels warm and fuzzy. The Confirmation Bias is so powerful that even when we understand it deeply and witness our intransigence, we find it hard to correct.

Michael Shermer, author of The Mind of the Market, says: "Confirmation bias is where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore disconfirmatory evidence."

Lewis Wolpert, author of Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, says: "Beliefs, once acquired, have a kind of inertia in that there is a preference to alter them as little as possible. There is a tendency to reject evidence or ideas that are inconsistent with our beliefs." (page 85)

The Confirmation Bias sways us to...

• favor evidence that agrees with our position

• believe the future will bring new evidence to support it

• cling stubbornly and passionately to our stance

• adopt positions from traditions, religions and ideologies

Synonyms: The Semmelweis Effect, the belief bias, belief preservation, biased assimilation, belief overkill, hypothesis locking, polarization effect, the Tolstoy syndrome, selective thinking, myside bias, law of fives, and Morton's demon.

The Certainty Epidemic
We all seem convinced we're right about politics, religion or science these days. What makes us so sure of ourselves.
By Robert Burton, author of ON BEING CERTAIN

Certainty is everywhere. Fundamentalism is in full bloom. Legions of authorities cloaked in total conviction tell us why we should invade country X, ban "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in schools, eat stewed tomatoes, how much brain damage is necessary to justify a plea of diminished capacity, the precise moment when a sperm and an egg must be treated as a human being, and why the stock market will revert to historical returns. A public change of mind is national news.
But why? Is this simply a matter of stubbornness, arrogance or misguided thinking, or is the problem more deeply rooted in brain biology? Since my early days in neurology training, I have been puzzled by this most basic of cognitive problems: What does it mean to be convinced? This question might sound foolish. You study the evidence, weigh the pros and cons, and make a decision. If the evidence is strong enough, you are convinced there is no other reasonable answer. Your resulting sense of certainty feels like the only logical and justifiable conclusion to a conscious and deliberate line of reasoning.
But modern biology is pointing in a different direction. It is telling us that despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. Feeling correct or certain isn't a deliberate conclusion or conscious choice. It is a mental sensation that happens to us.
The importance of being aware that certainty has involuntary neurological roots cannot be overstated. If science can shame us into questioning the nature of conviction, we might develop some degree of tolerance and an increased willingness to consider alternative ideas—from opposing religious or scientific views to contrary opinions at the dinner table.

The Self-Serving Bias

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The tendency to take credit for desirable outcomes and blame others for undesirable ones.

A student who gets a good grade on an exam might say, "I got an A because I am intelligent and I studied hard!" whereas a student who does poorly on an exam might say, "The teacher gave me an F because he doesn't like me! It's not my fault."

Three reasons have been proposed to explain the self-serving bias. The first explanation is motivational: people are motivated to protect their self-esteem, so create explanations that make them feel better. The second explanation focuses on making impressions on others: although people may not believe the content of a self-serving utterance, they may offer it to others to create a favorable impression. The third focuses on the mechanisms of memory: reasons for success might be more memorable than reasons for failure.

The Contrast Bias

2010-11-22T09:48:00.001-08:00

The tendency to mentally upgrade or downgrade an object when comparing it to a contrasting object.

We constantly compare things, people and situations. We deem them bad, good or neutral depending on what we've recently experienced in the same category. We voted for Obama because we compared him to Bush. Contrast effects are common in human thinking.

• A hefted weight is perceived as heavier than normal when "contrasted" with a lighter weight. It is perceived as lighter than normal when contrasted with a heavier weight.

• An animal works harder than normal for a given amount of reward when that amount is contrasted with a lesser amount and works less energetically for that given amount when it is contrasted with a greater amount.

• A person appears more appealing than normal when contrasted with a person of less appeal and less appealing than normal when contrasted with one of greater appeal.

So if you were to compare your car to a clunker and not a Maserati, you'd feel better.

The Planning Fallacy

2010-11-22T09:47:00.001-08:00

The tendency to underestimate the time is takes to complete a task.

The Denver International Airport opened 16 months late, at a cost overrun of $2 billion. The Eurofighter Typhoon, a joint defense project of several European countries, was delivered 54 months late at a cost of £19 billion, instead of £7 billion. The Sydney Opera House may be the most legendary construction overrun of all time, originally estimated to be completed in 1963 for $7 million, and finally completed in 1973 for $102 million. Planners tend to focus on the project itself and underestimate time for sickness, vacation, meetings, and other "overhead" tasks.

In one study, 37 students were asked to estimate the completion times for their senior theses. The average estimate was 33.9 days. Only about 30-percent of the students were able to complete their thesis in the amount of time they predicted, and the average actual completion time was 55.5 days.

On the opening date for the St. Regis in Kauai: "Originally slated to accept reservations as early as March, the St. Regis public relations department released an official announcement Tuesday evening saying that the opening has been delayed until October 1." (The Garden Island; May 1, 2009)

The Just-World Bias

2010-11-22T09:46:00.001-08:00

The tendency for people to believe the world is "just" and therefore people "get what they deserve."

People fantasize that the world is "just," so when they witness something bad happening to someone, they often rationalize it by searching for things the victim might have done to deserve it. "She brought it on herself because she..." This deflects their anxiety, lets them continue to believe that the world is a just place, but at the expense of blaming victims for many things that weren't, objectively, their fault. A not-nice, but natural, way to judge people in need. We must learn to distinguish between true-karma and false-karma. The caste system in India is a classic case of false-karma because it sentences millions of the unborn to a slummy slot in life.

The Loss Aversion Bias

2010-11-22T09:45:00.001-08:00

The tendency to find losses twice as painful as we find gains pleasurable.

“People hate losses (and their Automatic Systems can get pretty emotional about them). Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy....Consequently loss aversion produces inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings,” says Richard Thaler, author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. Loss-aversion was first convincingly demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Tune into a fascinating Kahneman lecture here.

LOSS-AVERSION & MONEY MANAGEMENT: "Loss aversion also explains one of the most common investment mistakes: investors evaluating their stock portfolios are most likely to sell stocks that have increased in value. Unfortunately, this means that they end up holding on to their depreciating stocks. Over the long term, this strategy is exceedingly foolish, since ultimately it leads to a portfolio composed entirely of shares that are losing money. Even professional money managers are vulnerable to this bias and tend to hold losing stocks twice and long as winning stocks. Why does an investor do this? Because he is afraid to take a loss—it feels bad—and selling shares that have decreased in value makes the loss tangible. We try to postpone the pain for as long as possible...The only people who are immune to this mistake are neurologically impaired people who can't feel any emotions at all. In most situations, these people have very damaged decision-making abilities. And yet, because they don't feel the extra sting of loss, they are able to avoid the costly emotional errors brought on by loss aversion," writes Jonah Lehrer in his new book, How We Decide.

LOSS-AVERSION AND WAR: Nations have gone to war until their doom because of loss aversion. It simply means you refuse to admit you made a mistake. "Once we have committed a lot of time or energy to a cause, it is nearly impossible to convince us that it is unworthy." The real question is, "How bad do your losses have to be before you change course?" (Social Psychology Fourth Edition, Aronson et al., p. 175)

READ AN ARTICLE FROM SCIENCE MAGAZINE:

"The Neural Basis of Loss Aversion in Decision-Making Under Risk"

We are risk-loving over losses

and risk-averse over gains.

The GroupThink Bias

2010-11-22T09:44:00.003-08:00

The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other folks do.

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images. A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the "oops area" becomes extra active, while the "reward area" slows down, making us think we are too different.

The two leading theories of conformity are that people look to the group because they're unsure of what to do, and that people go along with the norm because they are afraid of being different, said Dr. Gregory Berns, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Berns' research, which he describes in the book Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, found that brain mechanisms associated with fear and anxiety do play a part in situations where a person feels his or her opinion goes against the grain.

Also called "Herd Behavior" and "The Bandwagon Effect" and "The Conformity Effect."

MANTRA: To act more rationally, I must not get swept up into group acting, thinking and feeling frenzies.

The Beautiful People Bias

2010-11-22T09:44:00.001-08:00

The tendency for beautiful people to receive more rewards than less attractive people.

Do pretty people earn more? Studies show attractive students get more attention and higher evaluations from their teachers, good-looking patients get more personalized care from their doctors, and handsome criminals receive lighter sentences than less attractive convicts. But how much do looks matter at work? The ugly truth, according to economics professors Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas and Jeff Biddle of Michigan State University, is that plain people earn 5 percent to 10 percent less than people of average looks, who in turn earn 3 percent to 8 percent less than those deemed good-looking. These findings agree with other research that shows the penalty for being homely exceeds the premium for beauty and that across all occupations, the effects are greater for men than women.

Size matters, too. A study released last year by two professors at the University of Florida and University of North Carolina found that tall people earn considerably more money throughout their careers than their shorter co-workers, with each inch adding about $789 a year in pay. A survey of male graduates of the University of Pittsburgh found that the tallest students' average starting salary was 12 percent higher than their shorter colleagues'. The London Guildhall study showed that overweight women are more likely to be unemployed and that those who are working earn on average 5 percent less than their trimmer peers.

According to Dr. Gordon Patzer, who has spent more than three decades studying and writing about physical attractiveness, human beings are hard-wired to respond more favorably to attractive people. Even studies of babies show they will look more intently and longer at prettier faces.

"Good-looking men and women are generally judged to be more talented, kind, honest and intelligent than their less attractive counterparts," Patzer says. "Controlled studies show people go out of their way to help attractive people—of the same and opposite sex—because they want to be liked and accepted by good-looking people."

These conclusions may not sound too pretty to those of us who were dealt a bad hand in the looks department. But don't rush off to try out for the next round of "Extreme Makeover" just yet. Despite what the research says, some of the world's most successful people have been ordinary looking at best, and you would never mistake the faces in Fortune for those in Esquire or Entertainment Weekly. Business legends are often of average height (Bill Gates at 5 feet 9 inches) or even diminutive (Jack Welch, 5 feet 8 inches, and Ross Perot, 5 feet 7 inches). What's more, many folks who are lovely to look at complain that they lose out on jobs because people assume they are vacuous or lightweights.

According to Gordon Wainright, author of Teach Yourself Body Language, anyone can increase their attractiveness to others if they maintain good eye contact, act upbeat, dress well (with a dash of color to their wardrobe) and listen well. He also stresses the importance of posture and bearing and suggests that for one week you stand straight, tuck in your stomach, hold your head high and smile at those you meet.

The Von Restorff Effect

2010-11-22T09:43:00.001-08:00

The tendency to recall an item that "stands out like a purple cow" more easily than other items in a group.

A phenomenon of memory in which radically different things are more easily recalled than ordinary things. Memorizing isn't simply a matter of repetition. Attention plays a role in organizing material in ways that influence its later recall. For example, in any given number of items to be learned, an item that is different from the rest in size, colour, or other basic characteristics will be more readily recalled, such as a word printed in differently coloured ink or hi-lighted on a grocery list.

This bias is named after the German psychologist Hedwig von Restorff (1906–1962) who first reported it in 1933. Also known as The Isolation Effect.

The Omissions Bias

2010-11-22T09:35:00.001-08:00

The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions.

Sam, a tennis player, would be facing a tough opponent the next day in a decisive match. He knows his opponent is allergic to a food substance. Suppose Sam recommends the food containing the allergen to hurt his opponent’s performance, or the opponent himself orders the allergenic food, and Sam says nothing. Most people judge Sam’s action of recommending the allergenic food as being more immoral than Sam’s inaction of not informing the opponent of the allergenic substance. Which stance would you take?

The Neglect-of-Probability Bias

2010-11-22T09:16:00.001-08:00

The tendency to marvel over coincidences and ignore probabilities .

Why does probability-neglect happen? It's partly a psychological thing; imagining something happening and how we would feel about it is easy, natural, intuitive, but thinking about probability is difficult, mathematical, unfamiliar. And it's also partly a media problem; we have much more news reporting now than we did, say, thirty years ago. There were no 24-hour news channels then, only a small number of TV channels, and no internet. The news machine is voracious, and so when there is an accident or a disaster or any sort of human tragedy, it is reported and analysed endlessly. This makes us think that events which are actually very rare happen frequently, and perversely, events which are relatively common are under-reported precisely because they're not news.

Quiz: What's the safest way to travel? How much safer do you think it is to travel by car than to walk? A bit? A lot? Is a train safer than a plane? The best numbers I could find were fatalities per billion passenger kilometres for 1999:

Mode of Travel

Deaths Per Billion Passenger Km

Air 0.02

Boat 0.3

Rail 0.9

Car 2.8

Bicycle 41

Pedestrian 49

Motor cycle 112

The Information Overload Bias

2010-11-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

The tendency to place too much attention on information, even when it's barely relevant.

People often think, "The more information I acquire to make a decision, the better." But often, seeking extra information is a flagrant waste of time and money. Curiosity and confusion lead us into information binges. And, with Google continually beckoning and rewarding us, the info-gathering habit is harder to break than ever.

When you confront the brain with too much information, the quality of the decision tends to decline.

The Anchoring Effect

2010-11-22T09:13:00.001-08:00

The tendency to "anchor" (rely too heavily) on one piece of information when making a decision.

During normal decision-making, we often anchor, or overly rely, on specific information at the expense of other important information. We narrow our sights. Usually, once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that information. Take, for example, my mom while shopping for a boat. She focused excessively on the pretty blue curtains of an older Chris-Craft and didn't think about how well the engine worked. She paid $30,000 for the vessel which sat in a slip for a year while a mechanic fiddled with the engine. A year later, she dumped the boat (because it needed a new engine) and muttered something like, "Boats are holes in the water where you throw money...and the happiest day of a boat owner's life is the day they buy the boat and the day they sell it." This bias is also known as "The Focusing Effect."

The Impact Bias

2010-11-22T09:12:00.000-08:00

The tendency for people to overestimate the duration or intensity of their future feelings.

This bias says, it's not going to be as bad—or as fab!—as you might imagine, so relax. In other words, people seem to think that if disaster strikes, it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will feel elated, thrilled and titillated. The mind moves on, or does it? What about obsessing over bad things?

The Look-Alikes Bias

2010-11-22T09:03:00.001-08:00

The tendency for people to cozy up to people who look like themselves and pick on those who don't.

We migrate toward people who remind us of ourselves. We perch with look-alikes because we feel comfortable and validated when other folks share our physical appearance—nose shape, coloring, height, taste in clothes—as well as our opinions. Have you ever noticed that most couples look like brother and sister? Few people have made this observation yet it's so in-our-faces.

"From the little we do know, we can say that good people (we, us) are capable of incredible harm to others and even themselves. That daily moral decisions we make are not based on the principles of justice that we think they are, but are often a result of the familiarity and similarity of the other to oneself. These two simple types of bias happen because the mind and its workings remain invisible to us and until we unmask it meanderings, the disparity between what we do and what we think we do will remain murky," says MAHZARIN R. BANAJI, Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

The Denial Bias

2010-11-22T08:55:00.001-08:00

The tendency to discount or disbelieve an important and uncomfortable fact.

When faced with a fact that's uncomfortable to accept, this bias says, " Reject it! It's not true despite overwhelming evidence." The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimization), or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference). Denial is a generic defense mechanism.

Denial of Fact

Avoiding a fact by lying. Lying can take the form of an outright falsehood (commission), leaving out certain details to tailor a story (omission), or by falsely agreeing to something (assent). Someone who is in denial of fact is typically using lies to avoid facts they think may be painful to themselves or others.

Denial of Responsibility

Avoiding personal responsibility by blaming, minimizing or justifying. Blaming is a direct statement shifting culpability. Minimizing is an attempt to make the effects of an action seem less harmful than they are. Justifying presents reasons why someone is right. Denial of responsibility is a ploy to avoid potential harm or pain by shifting attention away from oneself.

Denial of Impact

Avoiding thinking about or understanding the harms one's behavior has caused to themselves or others. By doing this, the person is able to avoid feeling a sense of guilt and it can prevent that person from developing remorse or empathy for others. Denial of impact reduces or eliminates a sense of pain or harm from poor decisions.

Denial of Awareness

Avoiding pain and harm by stating he/she was in a different state of awareness (such as alcohol or drug intoxication or on occasion mental health related). This type of denial often overlaps with denial of responsibility.

Denial of Cycle

Avoiding looking at one's decisions leading up to an event or not considering one's pattern of decision-making and how harmful behavior is repeated. The pain and harm being avoided by this type of denial is more of the effort needed to change the focus from a singular event to looking at preceding events. Many who use this type of denial say things such as, "It just happened."

Denial of Denial

Denial of denial involves thoughts, actions and behaviors which bolster confidence that nothing needs to be changed in one's personal behavior. This form of denial typically overlaps with all of the other forms of denial, but involves more self-delusion.

BrainTip: When you're in denial, ask yourself, "Is it true that denying the facts is less painful in the long run? How does denial make me feel? And how would I feel if I faced, and heartily embraced, the truth?"

The Déformation Professionelle Bias

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The tendency to look at things from the point of view of your profession and forget a broader perspective.

A French phrase, Déformation Professionnelle, is a pun on the expression "formation professionnelle," meaning "professional training." The implication is that all (or most) professional training results to some extent in a distortion of the way the professional views the world. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," is an adage describing this phenomenon.

The Endowment Effect

2010-11-22T08:53:00.001-08:00

The tendency to demand much more to give up an object than you would be willing to pay to acquire it.

In one experiment, people demanded a higher price for a coffee mug that had been given to them, but put a lower price on one they did not yet own. People value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they don't. The endowment effect was described as inconsistent with standard economic theory which states that a person's willingness to pay for a good should be equal to their willingness to accept compensation to be deprived of the good.

This is from Jonah Lehrer 's blog, The Frontal Cortex:

JUNE 22, 2009

I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain.

The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, the endowment effect stipulates that once people own something - they have an established or imagined "property right" to the object - that something dramatically increases in subjective value.Wikipedia has an excellent summary of an experiment documenting the endowment effect by Dan Ariely and Ziv Carmon:

Duke University has a very small basketball stadium and the number of available tickets is much smaller than the number of people who want them, so the university has developed a complicated selection process for these tickets that is now a tradition. Roughly one week before a game, fans begin pitching tents in the grass in front of the stadium. At random intervals a university official sounds an air-horn which requires that the fans check in with the basketball authority. Anyone who doesn't check in within five minutes is cut from the waiting list. At certain more important games, even those who remain on the list until the bitter end aren't guaranteed a ticket, only an entry in a raffle in which they may or may not receive a ticket. After a final four game, Carmon and Ariely called all the students on the list who had been in the raffle. Posing as ticket scalpers, they probed those who had not won a ticket for the highest amount they would pay to buy one and received an average answer of $170. When they probed the students who had won a ticket for the lowest amount they would sell, they received an average of about $2,400. This showed that students who had won the tickets placed a value on the same tickets roughly fourteen times as high as those who had not won the tickets.

What does this have to do with fitting rooms and jeans? Once I tried on the pants, I became an implicit owner of them. I stared at myself in the mirror and admired the fit, the wash, etc. I thought about how good they would look with my shoes. I contemplated wearing them to various upcoming events and all the strangers who would look at my pants and think "Those are nice pants!" In other words, I spent a few minutes imagining my life with these new jeans and, once that happened, the pants suddenly became much more valuable. I mentally endowed myself with the object and didn't want to lose something that I didn't even own. As a result, the ridiculous price tag ($170 for Levis!) no longer seemed so ridiculous. The lesson? Don't try something on that you don't want to buy.

Update: Via a reader (thanks Alon!) comes this study, which demonstrates that merely touching an item can trigger the endowment effect.

The Illusory-Correlation Bias

2010-11-20T19:55:00.000-08:00

The tendency to inaccurately link an action and an effect.

It's so easy to overestimate a link between two variables—a cause with an effect—even when the link is slight to non-existent. For example, we might link being slim with happiness, assuming heavy women are less happy. Haven't you had the thought, "If I lose my pot belly, I'll be happier." But is it true? Isn't happiness dependent on myriad variables, including our brainstate or moods. And what about astrology, linking distant planets to earthly personalities? Really far-fetched and so many fall for it.

Redelmeier and Tversky (1996) assessed 18 arthritis patients over 15 months, while also taking comprehensive meteorological data. Virtually all of the patients were certain that their condition was correlated with the weather. In fact, the actual correlation was close to zero.

The opposite of an "illusory correlation" is an "invisible correlation," where an actual correlation is not seen. For instance, the link between smoking and cancer was not noticed for years.

IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU

After a delightful birthday lunch at Poggio’s in Sausalito, my friend Dawn (a fitness trainer who has hiked the 2,000 mile Pacific Coast Trail twice) and I went for a casual stroll in my hilly neighborhood.

Back at the house, she gasped, “Your fingers are blue! You might not be getting enough oxygen to your extremities. Take off your shoes, let’s look at your toes.”

They weren’t blue, which baffled us even more. We talked about calling a doctor, but first I needed to go to the bathroom. While sitting on the john, I glanced down at my hands, which were resting on my new unwashed blue jeans.

“The jeans did it!” I screamed.

“No way.”

“Let’s see if it comes off,” I said, lathering my hands with soap. Then I ran them across my white kitchen counter and, voila, it turned blue. We howled, realized we had been snookered by an illusory correlation.

According to David Ludden, associate professor of psychology at Lindsey Wilson College in Kentucky, there is a strong urge in humans to seek causes for events in their lives, and we fall for the ones we manufacture even if they’re wrong.

“No other species makes causal inferences like we do,” says Ludden. “This ability clearly gave humans a strong evolutionary advantage, allowing them to understand and—and hence control—their environments to a greater degree than any other animal. Still, our ability to ascertain causality is not that reliable. For one thing, we are prone to causal illusions—we infer causal relationships where none exist. Furthermore, when we are unable to explain why events occur, we feel distressed, so we tend to make up explanations with little or no evidence to support them. Nevertheless, the advantages of this ability to construct beliefs about causal relationships must have outweighed the negative side effects for early humans.”

So now I know why Dawn and I quickly fabricated a link between oxygen-deprivation and my fingers. What if we’d gone to the hospital? Would the doctors have figured out the true cause? Or would they have made up an illusory correlation, too?

My friend Lynn calls this cognitive bias “The Jumping-to-Conclusions Bias,” because conclusions appear quickly and with a feeling of certainty. To learn more about certainty, peruse neurologist Robert A. Burton’s keen tome, On Being Certain: Believing You're Right When You’re Not.

The Conservatism Bias

2010-11-20T17:55:00.001-08:00

The tendency for investors to react too slowly to changes in the market.

This is the tendency to cling tenaciously to a view or a forecast. Once a position has been stated most people find it very hard to move away from that view even when they are presented with new data. When movement does occur it is only very slow which creates under-reaction to events. This slowness to revise prior probability estimates is known as “conservatism.”

The Distinction Bias

2010-11-20T17:53:00.001-08:00

The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them together than separately.

Understanding the differences between joint evaluation and separate evaluation is important because we often make decisions by comparing options—but we typically experience options in isolation. This creates a mismatch in which the best decision may not provide the best experience. For example, when televisions are displayed next to each other on the sales floor, the difference in quality between two very similar, high-quality televisions may appear great. A consumer may pay a much higher price for the higher-quality television, even though the difference in quality is imperceptible when the televisions are viewed in isolation. Because the consumer will likely be watching only one television at a time, the lower-cost television would have provided a similar-quality viewing at a lower cost.

The Instant Gratification Bias

2010-11-20T17:52:00.001-08:00

The tendency to minimize the future and cave in to short-term highs.

Over millions of years, evolution selected strongly for creatures that lived largely in the moment. In every species that's ever been studied, animals tend to value the present far more than the future. And the closer temptation is, the harder it is to resist. When we're hungry, we gobble french fries as if driven to lard up on carbs and fat now, since we might not find any next week. Obesity is chronic not just because we routinely under-exercise, but also because our brain hasn't caught up with the relative cushiness of modern life. We continue to downplay the future hugely, even as we live in a world of all-night grocery stores and 24/7 pizza delivery.

Future-bashing extends way beyond food. It affects how we spend money, why we fail to save enough for retirement, and why we so frequently rack up enormous credit card debt. One dollar now seems more valuable than $1.20 a year from now. Doctors find that many people who've had heart bypass surgery don't take all the measures they recommend to significantly reduce the odds of future cardiac complications. The allure of that juicy pepperoni pizza now is too much to overcome against the distant benefit of living longer. So the more we minimize the future, the more we go for drugs, booze, and gluttony.

GOOGLE IT: This bias is also called “The Hyperbolic Discounting Curve.” The curve gets steeper and steeper as the reward date is pushed further out into the future. This makes it hard for people to make the right choices today for goodies that are years away.

The Base-Rate Bias

2010-11-20T17:50:00.001-08:00

The tendency to ignore statistics and focus on the particulars.

Charts and numbers bore and intimidate most of us. We're data phobic, prefer the warm fuzzies of the human touch and testimonials to hard facts. The word "probability" makes us squeamish, feel dumb. Nonetheless, we need to know that when judging a situation―for instance, diagnosing a patient's disease―there are two often types of information:

Type #1 Data about the frequency of the disease occurring in a large population.

Type #2 Specific information about the patient: results of tests and an examination.

When people have both types of information, they tend to make judgments based entirely upon Type 2 information, leaving out the statistics. It's best to consider both types of information because there is always some possibility that an observation or test may be wrong.

Source: Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, "Evidential Impact of Base Rates", in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Tversky, editors (1985), pp. 153-160.

The Illusion-of-Control Bias

2010-11-20T17:31:00.001-08:00

The tendency to believe we can control outcomes we clearly cannot.

One simple form of this fallacy is found in casinos: when rolling dice in craps, it has been shown that people tend to throw harder for high numbers and softer for low numbers. Under some circumstances, experimental subjects have been induced to believe that they could affect the outcome of a purely random coin toss. Subjects who guessed a series of coin tosses more successfully began to believe that they were actually better guessers, and believed that their guessing performance would be less accurate if they were distracted.

The Ostrich Effect

2010-11-20T17:25:00.000-08:00

The tendency to ignore an obvious risky situation by pretending it doesn't exist.

Have you ever been told, "You've got your head in the sand?" I have. I've ignored many obvious, negative situations. The name of this bias comes from the legend that ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger. In behavioral finance, the ostrich effect is the avoidance of apparently risky financial situations by pretending they don't exist.

The Better-Than-Average Bias

2010-11-20T17:24:00.001-08:00

The tendency to think we're better-than-average at many things.

People generally consider themselves smarter, luckier, better-looking and more important than they really are. They regard themselves as exceptional and believe they will avoid the divorces, premature deaths or weight gains that befall everyone else. The link between people’s personal estimations and the not-so-flattering reality is sometimes perilously weak. To social psychologists, flawed self-assessment is the norm. People systematically misjudge their abilities, virtues, importance and future actions. And those erroneous views can endanger health, ruin relationships, ruin finances and cause other miseries.

The Familiarity Bias

2010-11-20T17:18:00.001-08:00

The tendency to prefer things that are familiar.

Familiarity breeds liking. People tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be. The earliest known research on the exposure effect was conducted by Gustav Fechner in 1876. Edward B. Titchener also documented the effect and described the "glow of warmth" one feels when in the presence of something that is familiar.

Also called "The Mere Exposure Effect" and "The Propinquity Effect."

FAMILIARITY & YOUR MONEY

Tens of thousands of potential stock, bond, and mutual fund investments exist. So how do investors choose? Financial theory suggests we should analyze the expected return and risk of each investment. But no, investors tend to trade in the securities with which they are familiar. There is comfort in having your money invested in a business that is visible to you. This familiarity bias has a strong influence on what you buy.

Choosing investments is an exercise in decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Chip Heath and Amos Tversky show in a series of experiments that when people are faced with a choice between two gambles, they will pick the one that is more familiar to them. In fact, they will sometimes pick the more familiar gamble even if the odds of winning are lower! Gur Huberman argues that "Familiarity is associated with a general sense of comfort with the known and discomfort with-even distaste for and fear of-the alien and distant." For example, when given a list of countries and asked to rank order the performance of the economy or stock market in those countries, people rank their home country's performance better.

This sentiment can also be expressed in the form of affect, a belief that investment alternatives that are more familiar are better than those that are not. In this case, "better" usually means that they have higher expected return and lower risk than unfamiliar ones.

How does this bias impact you as an investor? The main problem is that when you buy the familiar, you underestimate the amount of risk in the investment. Because you underestimate the risk, you do not take the purposeful steps of reducing risk, like diversifying. So you end up taking more risk than desired. Implications are:

• Inferior asset allocation

• Too much allocation to one or few stocks

• Preferences for local stocks (home bias)

• Preferences for cultural proximity

• Preferences for professional proximity

REFERENCES: See Heath, Chip, and Amos Tversky, 1991, "Preference and Belief: Ambiguity and Competence in Choice under Uncertainty," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 4, 5-28, and Huberman, Gur, 2001, "Familiarity Breeds Investment," Review of Financial Studies, 14, 659-680.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE.

The Choice Supportive Bias

2010-11-20T16:46:00.001-08:00

The tendency to give positive qualities to an option we've chosen, simply because we've chosen it.

We conger up reasons why we chose the right, smart and edgy thing, and why our other options were wrong, stupid and dated. It's easy to justify our choices because we're living with them, in our drawers, parked in our garages, and in bed next to us in a granny gown. They're in our face while our other options are relegated to the fringes of consciousness. In truth, every choice has an upside and a downside, nothing is 100-percent desirable or undesirable. So why are we so smug about our choices? For one thing, the minute we commit to them, they become a part of our identity, our self image. To know thyself, make a list of thy choices.

The Optimism Bias

2010-11-20T16:45:00.003-08:00

The tendency to view ourselves as invulnerable (or less likely than others) to experiencing negative life events.

This personal fable also involves the tendency to overestimate one’s probability of experiencing positive life events. Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations. It seems that optimism bias is part of a general bias towards thinking positive things or "The Pollyanna Principle."

EXAMPLES

• People expect to live longer and be healthier than average.

• People underestimate their likelihood of getting a divorce.

• People overestimate their prospects for success on the job market.

• People expect to complete personal projects in less time than it actually takes to complete them.

• Second-year MBA students were found to overestimate the number of job offers they would receive, the magnitude of their starting salary, and how early they would receive their first offer."

• Professional financial analysts were reasonably able to anticipate periods of growth and decline in corporate earnings, but consistently overestimated earnings realized.

• Vacationers anticipate greater enjoyment during upcoming trips than they actually expressed during their trips

• Newlyweds almost uniformly expect that their marriages will endure a lifetime" despite the large proportion of marriages that end in divorce.

• Most people expect they have a better-then-average chance of living long, healthy lives; being successfully employed and happily married; and avoiding a variety of unwanted experiences such as being robbed and assaulted, injured in an automobile accident, or experiencing health problems.

• Between 85% and 90% of respondents claim that their future will be better —more pleasant and less painful—than the future of an average peer"

• Most smokers believe they are less at risk of developing smoking-related diseases than others who smoke.

• People believe that they are less likely [than average] to be victims of auto accidents and earthquakes.

• People believe that they are less likely than others to fall prey to illness, depression and unwanted pregnancies.

The Wishful-Thinking Bias

2010-11-20T16:45:00.001-08:00

The tendency to wish something to be true that's false, or vice versa.

We often interpret facts as we'd like them to be, not how they actually are. If I believe I can talk to Hazel, my beautiful, deceased grandmother, that's wishful-thinking. Lots of people subscribe to this fantasy. So what's the fact? The fact is there is no proof that I'm actually meeting with Hazel. No one can see her, except me, and I'm hallucinating or have a vivid imagination. A list of common wishful-thinking examples: seeing ghosts, believing there are gods, imagining eternal life, thinking the stock market will go up for another ten years, and so on. This bias is related to "The Tinkerbell Effect." If you wish hard enough for something to come true, this theory suggests you will get your wish.

The Ingroup Bias

2010-11-20T16:44:00.001-08:00

The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to members of their own group.

Experiments in psychology have shown that group members will award one another higher pay-offs even when the "group" is random and arbitrary, such as having the same birthday, grouped by shirt color, or being assigned to the same flip of a coin. Ingroup effects appear to be stronger when the group is smaller relative to another high-power group.

The Trait-Ascription Bias

2010-11-20T13:50:00.001-08:00

The tendency to believe that we are more unpredictable than others. "I know what you're up to, but you can't see through me."

I've often said, "She's so predictable, so consistent!" I thought I could predict what others might do and they would be clueless about me because I'm more mysterious and spontaneous. So much for that illusion. This attributional-bias has an obvious role in the formation of stereotypes and prejudice.

The Barnum Effect

2010-11-20T13:49:00.001-08:00

The tendency to give high-accuracy ratings to vague and general descriptions of our personalities.

"We've got something for everyone," said P. T. Barnum. His knack for creating shows with a broad appeal inspired the name of this effect, also called "The Forer Effect" and "The Personal Validation Fallacy." This bias provides a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some pseudosciences such as astrology and fortune telling, as well as many types of personality tests. Cunning psychics take advantage of this effect because it enables them to pitch generalized statements and feel confident that many people will apply them to themselves and believe they are specific.

So successful psychics are crafty, talented generalizers. They toss out fabricated information about you rapidly until something sticks, until they see a glimmer in your eye and excitement in our demeanor. They read your body language then expand on the topics that cause you to react. They are reaction readers.

BrainTip: You, too, can become a psychic. Just read, study and practice the information in the little booklet, Learn To Be A Psychic In 10 Easy Lessons!, a free pdf download from Skeptic.com.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

2010-11-20T13:48:00.001-08:00

The tendency for people to reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to see it.

The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999. The duo concluded the following:

• Incompetent people overestimate their level of skill.

• Incompetent people fail to recognize genuine skill in others.

• Incompetent people don't recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

• If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these people can recognize and talk about their previous lack of skill.

The Peter Principle spotlights the fact that every organisation feels the overpowering compulsion to promote a person from one level in the hierarchy to the next higher level. The danger of this predilection is that often this is from a level of competence to a level of incompetence. Thus, a competent mechanic is promoted to become an incompetent foreman, a competent foreman is made into an incompetent superintendent, a competent teacher is made into an incompetent vice-principal and a competent soldier is promoted to become an incompetent Field Marshal. In all these cases, the employees had been promoted to a position that they were incompetent to fill. Or, in other words, they have been promoted from a position of competence to a position of incompetence.

The Choice Blindness Effect

2010-11-20T13:46:00.001-08:00

The tendency to defend a choice even if our original choice has been covertly exchanged for something else.

In a fascinating study, volunteers were shown pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. Immediately after they made their choice, the people were asked to explain the reasons for their choices. Unknown to them, the scientists used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other, so they ended up with the face they didn't choose. You would think that they would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 percent of the trials, the participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering "reasons" for their "choice".

The Compromise Effect

2010-11-20T13:44:00.001-08:00

The tendency to avoid extremes and choose an intermediate choice.

People shy away from extremes. This aversion gives rise to “The Compromise Effect” which states that a customer is more likely to choose the middle option of a selection-set rather than the extreme option. The framing of a choice matters. Here are three classic examples based on studies:

• Going Out to Dinner: Almost everyone has had the experience of switching to the second most expensive entree on the menu, of doing so partly because of the presence of the most expensive item. Did you know that the expensive item is there to lure you into buying the second item? And guess which one has a higher profit margin? Yep, the second one.

• Buying a Car: A car-shopper who is given three options: the low-priced basic model with no extras, a high-priced fully-loaded model with all the extras, and a mid-priced model with a few extras, will most likely choose the middle option.

• Buying a Radio: When choosing between a small radio A and a midsized radio B, people usually choose A; but if a large radio C is added, people will choose B instead of A.

MANTRA: To act more rationally, I must not be swayed to choose a middle option flanked by two extremes.

The Actor-Observer Bias

2010-11-20T13:43:00.001-08:00

The tendency to think: "If others make mistakes, it's their fault. If I do it, it's not my fault. It's due to the situation I'm in."

People frequently presume that the mistakes of others are due to a personality flaw, possibly genetic. This bias is coupled with the opposite tendency to explain our own actions by overemphasizing situations and underemphasizing our personality. "The situation made me do it, so gimme some slack. It's not my fault."

"Dreadful experiences make us wonder whether the person who experiences them may not be dreadful." —Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (p. 61)

The Halo Effect

2010-11-20T13:42:00.001-08:00

The tendency for people to think that a person's positive or negative traits "spill over" from one area of life to another.

Halo Effects occur when one good quality about a person—for instance, a woman keeps a highly organized home—leads us to assume she is organized in other areas of her life. In a school context, a student who receives an "A" on the first piece of homework might end up getting undue slack from a teacher on further grading, because the teacher expects him to continue producing A-work. The inverse of the halo effect is the "Devil Effect" or the "Horns Effect," where one instance of bad performance causes the victim to be attributed negatively in an unfair fashion in the future.

The halo effect is a cognitive bias, a "mental shortcut" or even "cognitive illusion," that causes people to behave in ways that an unbiased observer considers unjustified. Because our entire lives are permeated by these cognitive judgments, they affect the very fabric of our society. So hang it there and keep learning them on this website. Metacognition rocks.

The Hindsight Bias

2010-11-20T13:41:00.001-08:00

The tendency to see past events as being predictable.

Hindsight is the inclination to see events that have occurred as being more predictable than they, in fact, were before they took place. The event that actually happened is more prominent in our mind than the possible outcomes that didn't occur. This bias has been demonstrated experimentally in a variety of settings, including politics, games and medicine. Also called "The I-Knew-It-All-Along Effect."

The Expert's Opinion Bias

2010-11-20T13:40:00.001-08:00

The tendency to overvalue the opinion of experts and undervalue our own ability for making wise decisions.

With hindsight, the causes of the current global financial meltdown seem obvious, even predictable. Now, brain imaging offers one explanation for why so few investors challenged foolhardy fiscal advice. Our brains raise few objections when presented with seemingly expert guidance, new research suggests.

"Most average people have this tendency to turn off their own capacity for making judgments when an expert comes into the picture," says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Berns' team presented 24 young volunteers with a simple choice: accept a sure payment or bet on a riskier, yet higher-paying lottery. When weighing this decision, volunteers activated brain circuits known to calculate risk and reward. In line with previous research, the team noticed more brain activation in these dopamine-delivering areas when the expected reward was higher.

"When advice is not there, when people are making these judgments on their own, you can make clear correlations with expected value in the lottery and areas associated with the dopamine system," he says.

To see how subjects respond to financial advice, the team told volunteers that Charles Noussair, an economics professor at Emory who advises the US Federal Reserve, would offer his opinion on whether they should accept the easy money or take a chance.

In reality, a computer program told volunteers to accept the sure thing if it added up to about 20% or more of the lottery sweepstake. Volunteers usually took this advice blindly, brain scans suggest. Correlations between increased potential reward and brain activity disappeared when volunteers received the advice.

"That suggests that the normal mechanisms people use to evaluate risk and reward are not being used when you have an expert telling you what to do," Berns says. "I think this explains a lot, if not everything, about the current market situation," he adds, urging people to take expert advice—fiscal, medical or otherwise—more shrewdly. "In my opinion, decision-making shouldn't be handed over to anyone, expert or otherwise."

Reference: New Scientist magazine, 24 March 2009; "Brain quirk could help explain financial crisis" by Ewen Callaway.

The Money Illusion Bias

2010-11-20T10:26:00.001-08:00

The tendency for people to think of money in nominal, rather than real terms.

In economics, "nominal value" refers to any price expressed in money of the day, as opposed to "real value," which adjusts for the effect of inflation. The Money Illusion refers to the tendency of people to think of currency in nominal terms only. In other words, the numerical/face value (nominal value) of money is mistaken for its purchasing power (real value). This is irrational because modern fiat currencies have no inherent value and their real value is derived from their ability to be exchanged for goods.

John Maynard Keynes coined the term "money illusion" in the early twentieth century, and in 1928, Irving Fisher wrote an important book on the subject, The Money Illusion. The existence of money illusion is disputed by monetary economists who contend that people act rationally (read: think in real prices) with regard to their personal wealth. Nonetheless, Shafir, Diamond and Tversky (1997) have provided compelling empirical evidence for the existence of this brain bias.

The Money Illusion influences economic behaviour in three main ways:

• Price stickiness: Money illusion provides one strong reason why nominal prices are slow to change even when inflation has caused real prices and costs to skyrocket.

• Contracts and laws are not indexed to inflation as frequently as one would expect.

• Social discourse, in formal media and more generally, reflects some confusion about real and nominal value.

The Projection Bias

2010-11-20T10:25:00.001-08:00

The tendency to assume that others share similar values, beliefs or thoughts.

Here are three types of projection:

• Complementary projection is assuming that others do, think and feel in the same way as you. Thus we see our friends as being more like us than they really are.

• Complimentary projection is assuming that others can do things as well as you.

• Neurotic projection is perceiving others as operating in ways one finds objectionable in oneself.

Being aware of psychological projection in interpersonal relationships is very important. Before attributing thoughts or ideas to someone else, you may want to reflect on whether those beliefs can also be seen in yourself.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

2010-11-20T10:24:00.001-08:00

The tendency to engage in behaviors that bring results which confirm our beliefs.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that causes itself to become true due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy" and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his book Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton says:

"The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come 'true'. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning."

In other words, a prophecy declared as truth, when it is actually false, may influence people, either through fear or confusion, so that their reactions fulfill the once-false prophecy.

The Pygmalion Effect, or Rosenthal effect, refers to situations in which students perform better than other students simply because they are expected to do so. The effect is named after George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, in which a professor makes a bet that he can teach a poor flower girl to speak and act like an upper-class lady, and is successful. This effect requires a student to internalize the expectations of their superiors. It is a form of Self-fulfilling Prophecy, and in this respect, students with poor expectations internalize their negative label, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly. Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regards to education and social class.

Reference: Merton, Robert K (1968). Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. pp. 477.

The Availability Bias

2010-11-20T08:44:00.001-08:00

The tendency to base a prediction of the frequency of an event on how easily one example comes to mind.

When a story (anecdote, testimonial) like "I know an Aussie who..." is used to prove a claim, the availability bias has kicked in. Because an example is "mentally available," we think it is representative of the whole, even if it is a glaring exception. Essentially the availability bias operates on the notion that "If you can think of it, it must be important." It thrives on what is readily available in memory, what is vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged. Two examples follow:

• Someone says to a group of friends, "People who drive red cars get more speeding tickets." The group agrees because they all know Jason who drives a red Porsche and frequently gets nabbed for speeding. The reality is, he has a history of driving fast in every car he's owned since high school. His previous cars were blue, silver and black.

• Tom told me that cigarettes—he smoked Camels without a filter and marijuana—aren't unhealthy because his grandfather smoked two packs a day and lived to be 93. "He passed away with a cigarette in his hands." Tom died of lung cancer at 64. He bet his life on his story.

"The availability bias is present in the minds of everyone from young children to professional economists. Research shows that even formal education through the PhD level has only marginal effects on this bias," says John Ray, a decision-science major at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Skeptical Inquirer magazine (March/April 2009, p. 41)

The availability bias was discovered in 1974 by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky who said, "There are situations in which people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind."

The Outgroup Homogeneity Bias

2010-11-20T08:41:00.001-08:00

The tendency to see members of one's own group as being more varied than members of other groups.

In sociology, an outgroup is a social group towards which an individual feels contempt, opposition or a desire to compete. The implications of this effect to stereotyping is obvious. A similar bias on the individual level is The Trait Ascription Bias.

The Gullibility Bias

2010-11-20T08:40:00.001-08:00

The tendency to become more gullible when we feel out of control.

Why do people fall for con-artists, conspiracy theories, and paranormal ideas? In situations in which a person is not in control, they're more likely to spot patterns where none exist, to see illusions, to believe things that are highly improbable.

In a series of experiments, researchers created situations in which people had less control over their situation, and then tested how likely the participants were to see imaginary images embedded in snowy pictures. The researchers also had participants write about either a situation in which they had control, or a situation in which they didn't, and then presented stories involving strange coincidences. People who had written about a situation in which they were not in control were more likely to draw non-existent connections between the coincidences, the researchers found.

This summary suggests out-of-control-feeling folks are biased to see more than there is, but perhaps in-control-feeling folks are biased to see less than there is.

The Fading Effect

2010-11-20T08:38:00.000-08:00

The tendency for unpleasant memories to fade more quickly than pleasant ones.

Surveys conducted in the United States and around the world consistently show that people are generally happy with their lives, even for those with physical and mental disabilities and people without much money. Researchers reviewing several studies on autobiographical memory and happiness have found that human memory is biased toward happiness.

In their article, W. Richard Walker, Ph.D., of Winston-Salem State University and colleagues find two causes for people’s recollection of the past to be positively biased. The first cause, according to their review of the research, seems to be due to the simple fact that pleasant events do in fact outnumber unpleasant events because people seek out positive experiences and avoid negative ones. Across 12 studies conducted by five different research teams, people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and participants who ranged in age from late teens to early 50’s consistently reported experiencing more positive events in their lives than negative events.

The other process at work involves our memory system treating pleasant emotions differently from unpleasant emotions. Seven studies reviewed by the researchers provide support for a fading affect for negative emotions. Pleasant emotions have been found to fade more slowly from our memory than unpleasant emotions. One mechanism for this uneven fading may involve a process known as minimization. In order to return to our normal level of happiness, we try to minimize the impact of life events. This minimization process – which occurs biologically, cognitively and socially -- is usually stronger for negative events than for positive events.

“This implies that there is a tendency to ‘deaden’ the emotional impact of negative events relative to the impact of positive events,” according Dr. Walker. “Such deadening occurs directly because people are motivated to view their life events in a relatively positive light.”

The research shows that this fading affect bias represents genuine emotional fading rather than a retrospective error in memory, and it should be viewed as evidence of healthy coping processes operating in memory, according to the authors. They add that this should not be confused with repression, a theory proposed by Sigmund Freud. This research suggests that people do remember negative events; they just remember them less negatively.

Of course, life is not pleasant for everyone. Of the 229 participants involved in eight reviewed studies where diary entries were tracked, 17 reported more unpleasant than pleasant events, indicating that the fading affect does not work for everyone. Among those with mild depression, unpleasant and pleasant emotions tend to fade evenly. In a new study to be published by the review authors, 330 participants recalled six emotionally intense memories from their lives and provided a series of ratings for each event. The participants were also assessed on depression levels. The researchers found increased levels of depression were associated with a greater disruption of the fading affect bias.

These findings are published in the June 2003 issue of Review of General Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).

The Reactance Bias

2010-11-20T08:33:00.001-08:00

The tendency to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do because you think they are trying to constrain your freedom of choice.

Reactance can occur when someone pressures you to accept a certain viewpoint. It can cause you to actually strengthen your stance. For example, do teens drink in excess in an environment of prohibition when they wouldn't do so in a more permissive culture.

People who use "reverse psychology" are playing on an awareness of reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request. This is a frequent method used in fraudulent or unethical sales pitches, manipulating a consumer into choosing an option they would not necessarily buy.

The Authority Bias

2010-11-20T08:07:00.001-08:00

The tendency to take on the opinion of someone who's seen as an authority on a subject.

First, we over-value the opinion of mommy and daddy, then our peers, our teachers and our personal god(s). Later on, it's experts on stuff: art critics, pundits, doctors, repair people, and so on. Adoring the opinion on one expert is risky. There's always a second, third, fourth opinion. "But what if I don't have the time or money for another opinion?" Then you're screwed, or could be. "And what if a really brilliant expert screws up?" That's bad luck.

BrainTip: Inquire about the credentials of so-called experts? Gather, at least, one more opinion, especially if the issue is import and, if your health of wealth are at risk. Think critically!

The Racism Bias

2010-11-20T08:05:00.001-08:00

The tendency to avoid and mistreat people who look different.

It's innate to be repulsed by people who have different belief systems. We wonder, "Where'd they get such twisted ideas?" and "I'm right, they're loco." It's so easy to loathe people who look different. "Their nose is so wide?" and "They wear funny clothes." We do not relate well to otherness. We become gripped by an avoidance reflex, a self-protection mechanism which is, sadly, a totally natural impulse. So why blame ourselves for racism when we're born hugely tribal? Why not? Blame, in this instance, seems sane.

"We have a natural aversion to Others, and we show a remarkable ability to sort people into in-group/out-group categories on the most minute levels of criteria—think of such gangs are the Crips and the Bloods, or such ethnic disputes as those between the Hutus and the Tutsis, or the Shiites and the Sunnis. Although we have educated and legislated these ancient tribal rituals out of our culture, their psychological underpinnings are still buried deep in our Paleolithic brains, waiting to be stirred into action." writes Michael Shermer in his bestseller The Mind of the Market.

The Difficulty of Loving Strangers
by Jonah Lehrer
Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong has a great post on a new study looking at oxytocin, a brain hormone that’s typically associated with feelings of trust and love. The hormone pours into the bloodstream, for instance, during childbirth, triggering contractions and child-mother bonding. (Synthetic versions of oxytocin, such as pitocin, are used to induce labor.) In recent years, the chemical also been linked to Prairie vole monogamy, increased generosity in the Ultimatum Game and trusting behavior when making risky investments. Such research has led, inevitably, to idiotic products like this:
This new study, however, complicates the feel good narrative. It turns out that oxytocin isn’t simply a chemical version of social affection. Here’s Yong, summarizing the work of Carsten de Dreu at the University of Amsterdam:
De Dreu asked 280 Dutch men to take three puffs form an oxytocin nose-spray, or a placebo that contained the same mixture without the hormone. It was a “double-blind” study – neither de Dreu nor the men knew who had been given what until the results were in.
First, de Dreu looked for any hidden biases in the volunteers’ reactions to German, Arab or other Dutch men. He used an ‘implicit association test, where volunteers used two keys to categorise words into different groups (e.g. Dutch names or German/Arab names, or positive and negative). Combinations of categories that contradict our biases should subtly slow our reaction times. If people are biased against Arab people, they’d take longer to finish the test if the same key was assigned to both Arab names and positive words. These “implicit associations” are very hard to fake, especially if the test is done at speed.
Sure enough, oxytocin strengthened the biases of the Dutch volunteers. When they sniffed oxytocin (rather than the placebo), they were quicker to associate positive words with Dutch names than with either German or Arab ones.
Finally, de Dreu showed that these shifting biases could affect the moral choices we make. He presented volunteers with a famous series of moral dilemmas. For example, a runaway rail trolley is hurtling towards five people who are about to be killed unless you flip a switch that diverts the trolley into the path of just one person. All of the dilemmas took the same form – you weigh the lives of one person against a group. And in all the cases, the lone person had either a Dutch, German or Arab name, while the group were nameless.
After a sniff of placebo, the Dutch volunteers were just as likely to sacrifice the single person, no matter what name they had. But after sniffing oxytocin, they were far less likely to sacrifice the Dutch loners than the German and Arab ones.
This suggests that the feelings of trust and warmth triggered by oxytocin come with a hidden cost, in that we become less likely to trust “outsiders.” Although the chemical sharpens our positive feelings towards those we already know and understand, it also exaggerates the perceived differences between our in-group and everyone else. There is no love for all.

The Gambler's Fallacy

2010-11-20T08:03:00.001-08:00

The tendency to believe in hot-and-cold streaks.

We tend to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events. We've all seen people win several rolls of the dice in roulette and have marveled at basketball players who shoot successfully in "streaks." Sportscasters say they have a "hot hand." This widely held belief is false. Scientists have found that the success of a previous throw only very slightly predicts a subsequent success or miss. A similar effect occurs for other types of random dispersions, including seeing streaks in stock market price fluctuations over time. This bias is also called "The Monte Carlo Bias" and "The Clustering Illusion."

The Status Quo Bias

2010-11-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

The tendency to say "no" to opportunities for trying new things.

People get stuck in established behaviors unless the incentive to change is compelling. This finding has been observed in many fields, including political science and economics. In the film Yes Man, Jim Carrey stars as Carl Allen, a man who signs up for a self-help program based on one simple principle: say yes to everything and anything new. Unleashing the power of “yes” transforms Carl’s life in amazing and unexpected ways.

Your brain will urge you to eat the same food, visit the same cafés, talk to the same people, obsess on the same thoughts, and tolerate the same injustices. Why is it so hard to accept change? Paradoxically, it is for the very reason that our brains usually work so well; we are designed to learn something and make it automatic. The problem is that when circumstances change, our “efficient” brains keep trying to do things the same old way. In her new book AdaptAbility, author Mary Jane Ryan presents powerful strategies to retrain your brain to allow change.

You can't do it twice until you've tried it once.

The Bias Blind Spot

2010-11-20T07:56:00.001-08:00

The tendency not to see or compensate for our biases.

"I'm objective, you're biased." We can often spot the brain biases of others, but when it comes to our own, we're in la-la-land. We think that we're objective, reasonable and tuned into reality.

BrainTip: For starters, familiarize yourself with the biases described on this site. Become bias savvy. Next, think of a few examples of how your behavior demonstrates each bias. Better yet, write out the biases and your behaviors on index cards and post them on a bulletin board.

The One-Self Bias

2010-11-20T07:51:00.001-08:00

The tendency to think of ourselves as having one self, rather than a multiplicity of selves or no self.

Inside each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another. You hear these conflicting voices in your head all day long: "Don't eat another chocolate chip cookie." "Eat one!" "Just eat half, toss the rest." So why do we think we are one self and not many? The one-self illusion is, in part, produced by language. We use pronouns such as "I" and "me" and "mine." Why not "we" and "they." Plus we have just one body and others see us as a single unit, even if we're a siamese twin.

In the article "First Person Plural" by Paul Bloom in The Atlantic, November 2008, he says, "Each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self, if the two want different things?"

Patricia Churchland, a Neurophilosopher who teaches at UCSD, says, "There is no such thing as the self. I mean there isn't a little person in there. It doesn't mean that we don't have feelings of ourselves—of course we do!—but the self is a construction of the brain."

The Framing Bias

2010-11-20T07:50:00.001-08:00

The tendency to draw conclusions based on how data are presented.

FOOD: An ingredient's label saying "maple syrup" sounds better to us than one saying "cane sugar." We falsely conclude that the former is far better than the latter.

CLOTHES: Wearing a white lab coat frames medical personnel as more competent than they may be. We fall for uniforms when anyone can wear one.

MEDIA: A common framing-effect is produced by the media where news programs may try to follow the rules for objective reporting and yet inadvertently present the news in a way that prevents most audience members from making a balanced assessment of a situation.

TRASH: Framed Negatively: "You forgot to take out the trash. Why can't you remember such a simple chore?" Framed Positively: "Looks like the trash was forgotten again. Maybe we should set up a better reminder system. What are you using now?"

The Paranormal Bias

2010-11-20T07:47:00.001-08:00

The tendency to believe in the supernatural or paranormal.

No one has ever demonstrated clairvoyant abilities under properly controlled conditions, so why do we listen to people who sell supernaturalism? "The emerging consensus [from neuroscience] is that belief in the supernatural seems to arise from the same mental processes that underlie everyday reasoning and perception. But while the belief in ghosts, past lives, and the ability of the mind to move matter and the like originate in normal mental processes, those processes become hijacked and exaggerated," says Sharon Begley, science writer for Time in a fascinating article titled "Why We Believe."

Benefits of Paranormal Beliefs: We love having imaginary friends, entities we can call on anytime of day or night; they're dependable, totally devoted to us. Paranormal beliefs inspire awe, and we like feeling astounded, makes our heart pump faster. They enable us to use our vivid imagination, to it to its outer limits.

If you've never had a paranormal experience and believe in none of the things that science says don't exist except as tricks played on the gullible, then you're in the minority. A survey on beliefs of the general United States population regarding paranormal topics was conducted by the Gallup Organization in 2005, found that 73-percent of those polled believed in at least one of the ten paranormal items presented in the survey. The ten items included in the survey were: Extrasensory perception (41% held this belief), haunted houses (37%), ghosts (32%), telepathy (31%), clairvoyance (26%), astrology (25%), communication with the dead (21%), witches (21%), reincarnation (20%), and channeling spiritual entities (9%).

Daniel Kahneman Speaks at UC Berkeley

2010-11-20T07:43:00.001-08:00

Fascinating Facts about the Brain

2010-11-20T07:42:00.001-08:00

100 Billion

Estimated number of nerve cells in your brain.

1 Million

Number of new neuronal connections formed every second.

500 Trillion

Estimated number of synaptic connections in an adult brain.

25 Billion

Processing capacity of a typical desktop computer in instructions per second.

100 Trillion

Processing capacity of the human brain in instructions per second.

GLOSSARY

2010-11-20T07:40:00.001-08:00

Attributional Bias: Typically, people involved in an action (actors) view things differently from people not involved (observers). This bias is about the ways we decide who or what is responsible for an action.

Cognitive: Pertaining to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning.

Cognitive Psychology: A branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory and language.

Emergent property: The way complex systems arise out of interactions by individual particles, parts or agents. For example, our immune system is an emergent property of billions of cells working together to fight viruses and bacteria. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Heuristics: Rules-of-thumb thinking. Mental tools that evolved over millennia to help us make fast decisions in complex situations or where information is limited.

Metacognition: Thinking about your own thinking. Awareness of one's cognitive processes and the efficient use of self-awareness to self-regulate these processes.

Sense of self: "The self is an emergent phenomenon and not some separately existing entity, yet allows each of us to feel that we are individuals and not merely machinery," writes Robert Burton in On Being Certain.

Understanding the Mind

2010-11-20T07:31:00.001-08:00

If we understand our minds as we understand the physical world, everything will change.

This introductory essay was written for Edge.org by Mahzarin Banaji, Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

"Think about it: what we know about the human mind comes from data gathered for little over a 100 years. In actuality, only since the mid 20th century do we have anything approximating the sort of activity we would call a science of the mind. For a half century's work we've done pretty well, but the bald fact is we have almost no understanding of how the thing that affects all aspects of our lives does its work. The state of our decision making—whether it is about global warming or the human genome, about big bailouts on Wall Street or microfinancing in Asia, about single payer healthcare or not—is what it is because the machine that does all the heavy lifting is something we barely understand. Would we trust the furnace in our house if we understood it as little?

"From the little we do know, we can say that good people (we, us) are capable of incredible harm to others and even themselves. That daily moral decisions we make are not based on the principles of justice that we think they are, but are often a result of the familiarity and similarity of the other to oneself. These two simple biases [and the others that follow] happen because the mind and its workings remain invisible to us and until we unmask it meanderings, the disparity between what we do and what we think we do will remain murky."

Consciouness Signal Spanning the Brain

2010-11-20T07:28:00.001-08:00

Electrodes implanted in the brains of people with epilepsy might have resolved an ancient question about consciousness.

Signals from the electrodes seem to show that consciousness arises from the coordinated activity of the entire brain. The signals also take us closer to finding an objective "consciousness signature" that could be used to probe the process in animals and people with brain damage without inserting electrodes.

Previously it wasn't clear whether a dedicated brain area, or "seat of consciousness", was responsible for guiding our subjective view of the world, or whether consciousness was the result of concerted activity across the whole brain.

Probing the process has been a challenge, as non-invasive techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and EEG give either spatial or temporal information but not both. The best way to get both simultaneously is to implant electrodes deep inside the skull, but it is difficult to justify this in healthy people for ethical reasons.

Brainy opportunity

Now neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of INSERM in Gif sur Yvette, France, and colleagues have taken advantage of a unique opportunity. They have probed consciousness in 10 people who had intercranial electrodes implanted for treating drug-resistant epilepsy.

While monitoring signals from these electrodes, Gaillard's team flashed words in front of the volunteers for just 29 milliseconds. The words were either threatening (kill, anger) or emotionally neutral (cousin, see).

The words were preceded and followed by visual "masks", which block the words from being consciously processed, or the masks following the words weren't used, meaning the words could be consciously processed. The volunteers had to press a button to indicate the nature of the word, allowing the researchers to confirm whether the volunteer was conscious of it or not.

Between the 10 volunteers, the researchers received information from a total of 176 electrodes, which covered almost the whole brain. During the first 300 milliseconds of the experiment, brain activity during both the non-conscious and conscious tasks was very similar, indicating that the process of consciousness had not kicked in. But after that, there were several types of brain activity that only occurred in the individuals who were aware of the words.

Lost seat

First, there was an increase in the voltage levels of the signals in their brains. Second, the frequency and phase of neurons firing in different parts of the brain seemed to synchronise. Then some of these synchronised signals appeared to be triggering others. For example, activity in the occipital lobe seemed to cause activity in the frontal lobe.

Because this activity only occurred in volunteers when they were aware of the words, Gaillard's team argue that it constitutes a consciousness signature. As much of this activity was spread across the brain, they say that consciousness has no single "seat". "Consciousness is more a question of dynamics, than of a local activity," says Gaillard.

Bernard Baars of the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California, who proposed a "global access" theory of consciousness in 1983 agrees: "I'm thrilled by these results."

He says they provide the "first really solid, direct evidence" for his own theory. He also says that having such a signature will make it easier to look for signs of consciousness in people with brain damage, infants and animals with the help of non-invasive techniques such as EEG.

Journal reference: PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000061

For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

NEW SCIENTIST: 17 March 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy

Letter from a Reader

2010-11-20T07:27:00.001-08:00

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that I’ve really enjoyed your website and have encouraged my psychology students to read it. Thank you for the work you put into it!

Sincerely,

Dr. Mark Hoelterhoff

Senior Lecturer of Applied Psychology

University of Cumbria

Carlisle, UK

GroupThink Notes

2010-11-20T07:25:00.000-08:00

(CNN) You're in a room with 10 other people who seem to agree on something, but you hold the opposite view. Do you say something? Or do you just go along with the others?

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images.

A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the "oops area" becomes extra active, while the "reward area" slows down, making us think we are too different.

"We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment," said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. Watch to learn more about the study »

Participants, all female, had to rate 222 faces based on physical beauty on a scale from 1 to 8. Afterwards, researchers told each participant either that the average score was higher or that it was lower than her rating. Some participants were told the average rating was equal to her rating. The researchers then chatted with the participant before suddenly asking the participant to do the rating again. Most subjects changed their opinion toward the average.

The two leading theories of conformity are that people look to the group because they're unsure of what to do, and that people go along with the norm because they are afraid of being different, said Dr. Gregory Berns, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Berns' research, which he describes in the book "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently," found that brain mechanisms associated with fear and anxiety do play a part in situations where a person feels his or her opinion goes against the grain.

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Participants looked at projections of three-dimensional objects, and had to identify which shapes were similar. As with the new study in Neuron, participants tended to shift their opinion to the majority view, although in this case the problems had objectively correct answers. The effect was also more potent in this experiment because actors were in the room to simulate a group with a shared opinion, he said.

But brain images revealed participants were not lying just to fit in. Changes in the activation of the visual part of the brain suggest the group opinion actually changed participants' perceptions of what they saw.

One reason behind conformity is that, in terms of human evolution, going against the group is not beneficial to survival, Berns said. There is a tremendous survival advantage to being in a community, he said.

"Our brains are exquisitely tuned to what other people think about us, aligning our judgments to fit in with the group," Berns said.

The most famous experiments in the field were conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. He found that many people gave incorrect answers about matching lines printed on cards, echoing the incorrect answers of the actors in the room.

But unlike Berns' finding that fear and anxiety relate to this effect, Asch saw conformity studies reflections of people's reliance on one another for knowledge of the world, experts say.

The darker side of conformity relates to Stanley Milgram's experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, in which most people obeyed orders to deliver electric shocks to an innocent person in the next room. As in these studies, subjects caved into social pressure, presumably going against their own previous moral convictions. Read more about the Milgram study

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MayoClinic.com: Positive thinking

The research calls into question decision-making bodies that operate by consensus, Berns said. For example, in the U.S. legal system, many cases are decided by the unanimous judgment of the members of a jury.

"You can't separate those judgments from the fact that you have 12 people who have to come to a unanimous decision, and have to conform their opinion to each other, so of course it will distort how they view evidence," he said.

"Any type of group decision-making process that does not require unanimous decisions is likely to make a better one," Berns said. "That applies to committees in particular."

What does it take to break the conformity effect?

Asch talked about the power of the "minority of one." When a unanimous group pressures the individual, that group is weakened as soon as one person breaks off.

"Anyone inclined to draw too pessimistic conclusions from this report would do well to remind himself that the capacities for independence are not to be underestimated," Asch wrote in a 1955 "Scientific American" article describing his research. "He may also draw some consolation from a further observation: Those who participated in this challenging experiment agreed nearly without exception that independence was preferable to conformity." (January 17, 2009)