Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better

by Woo-Kyoung Ahn

People often fall for the illusion that they can perform a difficult feat after seeing someone else accomplish it effortlessly.

Some of my earlier studies were about this sort of phenomenon: namely, that people are more willing to derive a cause from a correlation when they can picture the underlying mechanism.

There’s no problem with that, unless the underlying mechanism is flawed. When we are wrongly convinced that we understand a fluent process, we are more likely to draw a flawed causal conclusion.

but the illusion of knowledge Q created by sprinkling his posts with operational jargon convinced many of their veracity.

Having access to unrelated information was enough to inflate their intellectual confidence.

The answer is that we can be susceptible to cognitive biases even after we learn about them because most (or perhaps all) of them are by-products of highly adaptive mechanisms that have

evolved over thousands of years to aid in our survival as a species. We can’t just turn them off.

Metacognition is a very important component of cognition. If you don’t know how to swim, you know not to jump into a deep pool,

one well-known rule is the 28 percent mortgage rule; your monthly payment should not exceed 28 percent of your monthly pre-tax income.

One simple solution is to make a task disfluent by physically trying it out. Read through your presentation out loud before you deliver it in front of an audience.

Talking through possible answers to practice questions is vital because you can objectify your responses.

We frequently underestimate the time and effort we need to complete a task, which is why we so often miss deadlines, exceed our budgets, or run out of energy before we finish.

always add 50 percent more time to my initial estimate, like when I tell a collaborator that I can look over the manuscript in three days, even though I actually think I can do it in two. This strategy works fairly well for me.

Optimism is like engine oil for the fluency effect: it makes everything appear to run more smoothly. When we are feeling optimistic, we shut our eyes to potential setbacks and obstacles.

Because optimism is a default mode for most people, it can easily worsen the fluency effect, resulting in blind optimism.

confirmation bias, our tendency to confirm what we already believe.

only about one-fifth of participants found the correct rule without first announcing any incorrect rules.

Readers of the Evian ad who do not consider these other possibilities are victims of confirmation bias,

Americans with Disabilities Act, elevator doors are required to remain open long enough to allow anyone using crutches or a wheelchair to get in.

Nonetheless, people neglected to check what would happen if they did not perform bloodletting.

Quiz When I give a lecture on confirmation bias, I grill students with the 2–4–6 task and

Use this quiz with students.

If 99 percent of people with poor leadership qualities also have high self-esteem, then we cannot conclude that there is a positive association between leadership and self-esteem. Because the researcher did not have that data, the correct answer is (d). One cannot draw any conclusions from the data.

That is what happens when you start out with a tentative hypothesis that becomes more certain and extreme as you exclusively accumulate confirming evidence, which in turn causes you to seek even more confirming evidence.

Yet such high predictive power is extremely rare, because there are many, many nongenetic factors as well as multiple interacting genes that determine actual outcomes.

The same goes with thoughts about one’s competency: once you start doubting your competency, you may avoid risks that could have led to greater career opportunities, and then, no surprise, your career will end up looking like you lack competency.

Don't doubt your competency.

In terms of the reasoning fallacy committed, giving only men the opportunities and concluding that men are better is no different than a child believing that monster spray works because they sprayed it in every room and haven’t seen any monsters since.

We would have had $16 trillion to address climate change, fix health care, and work toward world peace, if there had only been no confirmation bias.

The number of possible chess games, even with its limited number of pieces and well-defined rules, is estimated to be 10123, which is greater than the number of atoms in the observable world. Imagine how many possible versions of our future lie ahead of us. Thus, we need to stop our searches when they are satisfying enough. Simon called this “satisficing,” a word he created by combining “satisfying” and “

Interestingly, satisficers are happier than maximizers. That makes sense.

This is what I meant by exploiting our tendency to confirm hypotheses to overcome confirmation bias. While people were trying to confirm their hypothesis about MED, they unintentionally disconfirmed their hypothesis about DAX.

applications of this method. “Am I an introvert?”; “Am I an extrovert?”; “Am I bad at science?”; “Am I good at science?”; “Are dogs better than cats?”; “Are cats better than dogs?” Does the order of the questions matter? Yes, it does, as answers to the first question would likely bias the answers to the second question, and we will dive into that issue in a later chapter. For now, the point is that it’s important to give both sides a fair chance.

know it is confirmation bias, but it is not worth overcoming it if doing so may cause me to sacrifice five days of my life to an illness that I believe I could have prevented.

Instead, the group who learned the words best were the children who learned the words that were featured on the video directly from their parents without using the video.

The first location his app took him to was a psychiatric emergency center, a place he had never imagined visiting. But this got him hooked on the exercise.

The number of possible causes for any event, not just historical ones, is infinite. Nevertheless, we can narrow

During the pandemic of 2020, some people felt invincible, refusing to wear masks and holding big parties in

think that the cause we have in mind is sufficient to result in the effect, so we ignore other causes that could also be responsible for it.

Allegedly, Mozart’s widow burned 90 percent of his early sketches for his music to create the myth that he was such a genius that he composed everything in his head.

As Michelangelo once said about his painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, “If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.

In fact, a study showed that when people received a short-term monetary bonus, their performance improved, and when the bonus was removed, their productivity fell to a lower level than it was before.

A second group of participants read a passage that “males perform five percentile points better on math tests than women because of some genes that are found on the Y chromosome.” Reading that passage right before taking the test was sufficient to lower female participants’ scores by about 25 percent! That’s roughly the difference between a grade of A and C in my courses.

But according to the eggshell skull rule, the king is still responsible, because even if the plaintiff had the preexisting medical condition of a fragile skull, the injury would not have occurred if the wall had been properly maintained.

Whenever mass shootings occur, some people blame the shooters, reasoning that most gun owners don’t go out and shoot people, so there must be something abnormal about those shooters, such as their mental health, anger management ability, ideology, etc. But from a global perspective, it is clearly the United States that is abnormal.

According to the Small Arms Survey, the number of civilian

firearms per 100 persons in the United States was 120.5 in 2018, the ...

is to blame actions more than inactions.

When someone deliberately kills someone, it’s murder, and the punishment can be life in prison or death. But if someone watches a person dying whom they might have been able to save, they are considered guilty of negligent homicide, which carries a much lighter sentence—from six months to ten years in prison in most U.S. states.

rumination can cause depression.

Unfortunately, studies also show that rumination actually prevents us from effectively solving our problems. This could be because of confirmation bias. When we feel low, we continuously regurgitate memories that confirm that feeling. It’s hard to be a constructive problem-solver when you don’t have faith in yourself. Because rumination doesn’t help us discover solutions or causes, it can lead to further uncertainty, anxiety, and hopelessness about the future; it can spiral into alcohol abuse and eating disorders, as well.

Compared to participants in the same study who were instructed to use the self-immersed approach, participants using this distanced perspective showed significantly less anger, both at a conscious and unconscious level.