The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

Or, as social scientists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen starkly suggest, “trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller.”

Social proof, sometimes roughly termed the “herd instinct,” dictates that individuals feel they are behaving correctly when they act the same as other people. In other words, the more people who follow a certain idea, the better (truer) we deem the idea to be.

The confirmation bias is the mother of all misconceptions. It is the tendency to interpret new information so that it becomes compatible with our existing theories, beliefs, and convictions. In other words, we filter out any new information that contradicts our existing views (“disconfirming evidence”).

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Experiments show that people are willing to walk an extra ten minutes to save $10 on food. But those same people wouldn’t dream of walking ten minutes to save $10 on a $1,000 suit. An irrational move because ten minutes is ten minutes, and $10 is $10. Logically, you should walk back in both cases or not at all.

The availability bias says this: We create a picture of the world using the examples that most easily come to mind. This is idiotic, of course, because in reality, things don’t happen more frequently just because we can conceive of them more easily.

Imagine for a moment that, instead of demanding enemies’ riches, warriors and soldiers charged by the hour. We would effectively be incentivizing them to take as long as possible, right? So why do we do just this with lawyers, architects, consultants, accountants, and driving instructors? My advice: Forget hourly rates and always negotiate a fixed price in advance.

Induction seduces us and leads us to conclusions such as: “Mankind has always survived, so we will be able to tackle any future challenges, too.” Sounds good in theory, but what we fail to realize is that such a statement can only come from a species that has lasted until now. To assume that our existence to date is an indication of our future survival is a serious flaw in reasoning. Probably the most serious of all.

Losing $100 costs you a greater amount of happiness than the delight you would feel if I gave you $100. In fact, it has been proven that, emotionally, a loss “weighs” about twice that of a similar gain. Social scientists call this loss aversion.

“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know,”

We attribute success to ourselves and failures to external factors. This is the self-serving bias.

In the past, I sympathized with so-called early adopters, the breed of people who cannot survive without the latest iPhone. I thought they were ahead of their time. Now I regard them as irrational and suffering from a kind of sickness: neomania.

In conclusion: If you take your problem to an expert, don’t expect the overall best solution. Expect an approach that can be solved with the expert’s tool kit. The brain is not a central computer. Rather, it is a Swiss Army knife with many specialized tools. Unfortunately, our “pocketknives” are incomplete. Given our life experiences and our professional expertise, we already possess a few blades. But to better equip ourselves, we must try to add two or three additional tools to our repertoire—mental models that are far afield from our areas of expertise.

Take the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. Out of sheer thirst for recognition, terrorists murdered two hundred people. Let’s say a billion people devoted an hour of their time to following the aftermath: They viewed the minute-by-minute updates and listened to the inane chatter of a few “experts” and “commentators.” This is a very realistic “guesstimate” since India has more than a billion inhabitants. Thus our conservative calculation: One billion people multiplied by an hour’s distraction equals one billion hours of work stoppage. If we convert this, we learn that news consumption wasted around two thousand lives—ten times more than the attack. A sarcastic but accurate observation.