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January 3 - January 13, 2024
Numerous psychological studies have shown that people weigh negative information more heavily than positive information, and not just when forming judgments about products, but about people.
Behavioral economics has revealed numerous cognitive biases and thinking traps, challenging economics’ fundamental premise that people’s behavior is based on logical choices.
It’s not until the win/loss ratio is at least 2.5:1 (that is, you win $250 for heads and lose $100 for tails) that a majority of people will play. This is loss aversion. Loss looms much larger than gains. People weigh the impact of negativity far more heavily than the impact of positivity.
It seems that not wanting to give up money was a very powerful motivator
This is a very familiar scenario for any transaction of used items: the owner thinks it is more valuable than the buyer does. In behavioral economics, the phenomenon is called the endowment effect. The pricing mismatch can occur simply because the seller wants to make as much money as possible and the buyer wants to pay as little as possible.
the framing effect. Our preferences and choices are based on how the options are framed rather than the options per se.
He asked me why a yellow traffic light is called a yellow light. I didn’t understand his question, but he was only four, so I said, “It’s called a yellow light because it’s yellow.” To which he replied, “It’s not yellow, it’s orange.”
traffic lights are made orangish on purpose, to ensure maximum visibility (in officialdom and in the UK, they are referred to more accurately as amber lights).
When the participants could not apply such sophisticated skills because the study descriptions were so brief, biased assimilation did not occur. But once they had enough information, they could use those skills to find fault with the studies that contradicted their original position, to such a point that findings that were at odds with their beliefs ended up strengthening them.
so-called smart skills do not free people from irrational biases. Sometimes they can exacerbate the biases.
Understanding that biased interpretations are inevitable is a good first step when we are figuring out what we can do to counter their perils.
it’s not always the case that these people wish to harm us; they might just see the situation in their own way. We don’t have to get defensive every time. Sometimes, it’s easier and better to focus on solving the problems caused by different perspectives than trying to change those perspectives themselves.
My friend’s friend’s friend has a Ph.D. in biology and an elaborate and totally false theory about how mRNA COVID vaccines permanently damage our genes. Even so, her daughter ended up getting vaccinated because her college required her to do so before she could return to campus. This is an example of how a change at the systemic level can protect public health, even when people’s views are widely divergent.
the curse of knowledge: once you know something, you have trouble fully taking the perspective of someone who doesn’t know it, even if you are an adult.
The curse of knowledge makes us overconfident about the transparency of the messages we are conveying.
if we are to have empathy or compassion toward others, we also need to have emotional theory of mind: a comprehension of the fact that people can have different feelings, and knowledge of what they are likely to feel under which situations.
It’s now easy to see that it’s much harder to prove that the socks are not in the house than it is to prove that the socks are in the house. The same goes with proving null effects from experiments.
There actually is something very concrete that each of us can do to improve our ability to grasp others’ minds and to convey our thoughts more clearly. And it is simple: Stop letting others guess what we think and just tell them. Also, when texting sarcastic jokes, add emoticons like or .
People were willing to pay extra so they could make their decision after the uncertainty was removed—even though they’d likely be making the same decision no matter what the outcome was. Uncertainty about significant future outcomes can immobilize our decision-making.
the same 1 percent difference feels vastly different when we are comparing 0 percent to 1 percent and 10 percent to 11 percent. Mathematically, they are identical 1 percent differences, but psychologically, we treat them completely differently, because the first is the difference between something absolutely not happening versus some chance that it can happen—namely, the difference between certainty and uncertainty. In contrast, 10 percent and 11 percent both feel like small chances that aren’t that different.
The study found that those who wrote about the situation where they had power were more willing to wait for better rewards than those who imagined situations in which they lacked power.
Temporal discounting is why we overcommit ourselves. We grossly underestimate the potential costs, pains, efforts, and time that our commitments will require when they are a long way off.
Is there anything we can do to avoid the pitfalls of psychological distance? One method that has been shown to work is to think about future events with as much specific detail as we can summon in order to make the future feel more real.
Most of us live our whole lives either struggling to stay on solid ground or climbing mountain after mountain.
It is no small task to know when to persist and when to quit. To that end, I remind myself every day to enjoy the process of doing without jumping ahead to results.
If a goal is worth pursuing, even the pain that accompanies our practice feels good—just like the pain of good exercise, spicy hot pot, or icy cold tingling soda. But if you feel like you’re hurting yourself to achieve rewards and the only thing you enjoy is the final goal and not the process, it’s probably time to rethink—not just about your priorities but the way you think about them.
