The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

The unsuccessful don’t write books or give lectures on their failures.

Survivorship bias means this: People systematically overestimate their chances of success.

When it comes to pattern recognition, we are oversensitive. Regain your skepticism.

You are on your way to a concert. At an intersection, you encounter a group of people, all staring at the sky. Without even thinking about it, you peer upward, too. Why? Social proof.

Suppose that fifty thousand years ago you were traveling around the Serengeti with your hunter-gatherer friends, and suddenly they all bolted. What would you have done?

We are the direct heirs of those who copied the others’ behavior.

The sunk cost fallacy is therefore often referred to as the “Concorde effect.” It leads to costly, even disastrous, errors of judgment.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” said writer Aldous Huxley. However, we do exactly that, as super-investor Warren Buffett knows: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Both parties, the philanthropists and the misanthropes, simply filter disconfirming evidence (evidence to the contrary) and focus on the do-gooders and dictators who support their worldviews.

To stay informed, we browse news sites and blogs, forgetting that our favored pages mirror our existing values, be they liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between.

Whenever you are about to make a decision, think about which authority figures might be exerting an influence on your reasoning. And when you encounter one in the flesh, do your best to challenge him or her.

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.

So why is the hindsight bias so perilous? Well, it makes us believe we are better predictors than we actually are,