How Cognitive Biases Work

26:09It is very obvious. So, I mean, what this is showing is that our attention is limited, right? When we're really focused on a task, you saw that gorilla, those half of the people who didn't notice the gorilla, you still saw it, but you were so focused on the task that your brain was just getting rid of information that was unrelated to the task because it's not pertinent. It can become pertinent, though, when that gorilla decides to attack you. And so this is a cognitive bias we have where we're ignoring potentially unimportant information to take in the stuff that's related to the task at hand.

26:46Yeah, you know where they could really get away with this? Because where you have great concentration is at a professional sports game on the Jumbotron when they have the baseball under the helmet or whatever. And then they're moving them around and you got to find, you know, it's like three card money. because you're concentrating so hard on that. They could put whatever they wanted on that screen while that's going on, and I bet you most people would not. Or maybe I guess it's half if that's what they found. Yeah, I'll bet you're right. I'll bet you're right, man. I was trying to think of something where you're super trying to follow because I was happy I came up with the correct amount of passes at the end.

27:20You did. You said, what does it mean if I noticed the gorilla and got the correct number of passes? And I said, it means you're a perfect human. That's right, which we all know is not true. Um, none of us are Chuck. None of us are. Yeah, I know. So there's another one that you may have heard of before, even if you've not heard of any of these other ones called the Dunning Kruger effect. It became kind of viral because if you take it through the pop culture meat grinder, it becomes much more simplified and kind of loses some of its actuality, but people still like it because it's a good way to put other people down.

27:55Yeah, it is. Uh, this is the idea that the correct idea is that people with little understanding in an area tend to overestimate their ability and their knowledge about something. Right. Because they know so little they don't even know what they don't know, kind of. Right, exactly. But what you were talking about, it's kind of been transformed into like morons are the most braggadocious, which can be true. It can be. You know, I think that's one of the things. Like you said, you can be right with cognitive biases. is you're not wrong with them all the time. So yeah, that kind of supports that.

28:29But that's not what the Dunning-Kruger effect actually says. You said it. And then there's the opposite way too, where the more experience you have, the more expert you are in a field, the more you assume that it should be easier for you than it is. Yeah, that's a very valuable thing to understand, I think. And you get much further in life if people are like, well, you're the expert. And the expert's usually the one going, Yeah, but I don't know. Maybe we should hold off because, you know, X, Y and Z. Right. Yeah. So that's the actual Dunning-Kruger effect. And I saw that it's it's being assailed right now.

29:07People are starting to question even the basic version of it, like the actual academic version of it. Yes. So we'll see what happens with that. Oh, interesting. We've got the gambler's fallacy next. And that is, oh, boy, if you have ever gambled anywhere, but if you like go to casinos and stuff like that. you're going to see this all over the place. You're going to hear it spoken out loud. And this is the idea that you find patterns, um, where there are no patterns. Yeah. So if you're at the blackjack table and you hear the, the person next to you, like, well, oh man, see, I've lost four in a row.

29:43So I'm going to bet like, I'm going to go all in on this because I'm, I'm bound to win because I've lost four in a row. There's no way I'm going to lose five in a row. Right. The problem is, is those, each of those hands of blackjack are unrelated to one another. They don't form a pattern, but you are predicting a pattern that just doesn't exist. That means you're a fallacious gambler. It can get you in real trouble. I mean, you can do the same thing on the playground with coin tosses. In fact, coin tosses, I think, is a lot of times the way they sort of try and prove this. Yeah, because each coin toss, considering like you're playing with a perfect, unflogged coin that has no bias whatsoever.

30:23Each coin toss is totally unrelated to the last. So you could get 100 heads in a row, and that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean a tail is coming because each of those 100 heads in each of those coin tosses had nothing to do with the last one or the next one. I know. That's hard to break out of, though, because it seems very human to think, like, they flipped four heads in a row. There's no way there's going to be a fifth. Well, that's another reason why this is so hard. We're hardwired to find patterns and stuff. It's a way to navigate the world. It's the way we navigate the world is by finding patterns so that we can recognize things in the future and thus spend less energy getting back to homeostasis.

31:01That's right. This is all so interesting to me. I love this stuff. I knew that you loved it. This is Josh Clark Central. I love observing it because I can't grasp what it feels like to suffer any of these. So just to discuss it in this way is really fascinating to me. All right. Right. Let's talk about the base rate fallacy. That means you put more weight on just like one very specific piece of information instead of looking at all the pieces of information that have come your way. Yeah. And usually it's individuated information, meaning like, say, some quality or characteristic of one person.

31:36And then you're ignoring the base rate, which is like pure statistical information about what you're trying to figure out. And a really good example of this is like, let's say that you're looking at somebody who is super fit, a woman who's very fit and athletic. And you're asked, do you think that woman is a personal trainer or a teacher? Because basically the only evidence you have there is that this woman is very athletic and fit. You might say personal trainer. But if you took all the base rate information into account, you would know that even the very, say, very small portion of teachers who are very fit and athletic may be small compared to the total number of teachers.

32:18It's still much larger than the total number of personal trainers in the world. So statistically speaking, it's much likelier that that very fit athletic woman is a teacher and not a personal trainer. You don't do that because you think personal trainer, athletic fit, must be a personal trainer. You've just fallen prey to the base rate fallacy, my friend. Yeah. But she has on yoga pants and hokas. Exactly. That doesn't narrow down anything these days. Mm-mm. You know? How about the mere exposure effect, Chuck? And, like, mere is part of it. I'm not making a judgment about it. That's right. Right.

32:56That means just merely being exposed to something has a vast impact. So the more we experience something, the more you like it, which is why you see that commercial for the thing over and over and over that Burger King ad over and over and over. Although I wouldn't say that you might like that one the more you heard it. That's the outlier for me, too. but uh that that's the idea though there's just just mere exposure will will get you there and then there's a related thing called the illusory truth effect which is basically that repeated exposure to a lie um causes you to eventually believe in it if you hear it enough times even if you initially knew that it wasn't true so that makes me wonder if like it just wears you down over time like your brain is tired of defending itself against being assailed with a lie.

33:49And it's just like, fine, that's true. I don't care. Yeah. I mean, sure. Politics certainly comes to mind. Repeat the lie. Repeat the lie. Repeat the lie. Yeah. And I mean, like, it's a viable way to exploit people's cognitive biases in that respect. Should we end up, should we close out with the big daddy of them all, the big C, the big confirmation bias? Yeah, let's do it, baby. All right. Why don't you start this one? Okay. So there's a guy named Peter Wasson back in the 60s, he coined the term confirmation bias. And he basically had an experiment that's really clever. It's hard to understand at first, but it's very clever.

34:28He basically said, hey, here is a sequence of numbers, two, four, and six. Figure out what the pattern is. Just to be clear, this is really hard to explain. If you find somebody who can explain this well, you'll get it. But I don't think I'm a candidate for that. I think we all know that I'm not going to explain this very well. Oh, I don't think that's true. Do you want to take a crack? Okay. The original numbers were 2, 4, 6, and people might tend to go with like, all right, 8, 10, 12. And they're thinking it might be, all right, it's even number sequence, ascending even number. And they would say, no, that's not correct.

35:08And you said, well, maybe it's 4, 8, 12, and it's like doubled or something. And they would say, well, that's also incorrect. And then you're at wit's end because what you haven't done is just done any ascending order. You didn't go 179, 300. All right, let me take a crack at it. You ready? Sure. So the original number is 246 and the participants would try to come up with the explanation of why, like what are the, what pattern are those numbers following? Right. So you might say, uh, the, Like, does 8, 10, 12 work? And they would say yes. And you'd say, okay, well, then you're just looking at even numbers.

35:51And they would say, no, you still got this right. This still fits the pattern, but your hypothesis for it is wrong. Right. That's the key. Right. Here's where the confirmation bias came in. People would then go back and continue trying to find versions that fit their hypothesis to explain this, even though it was wrong. Yeah. Rather than take their hypothesis and say, okay, this is right. This fits the pattern, but it's still not correct. And start trying to break their original hypothesis by coming up with like just completely random stuff that doesn't fit their original hypothesis. In which case they might have said something like, does 1, 6, or 27 work?

36:31And they would say, no, that's not, that doesn't fit. And then that might lead the person to see that actually the only thing that has to be correct to be part of the model is that the numbers have to ascend in order. That was it. But people, man, just go. You might even try and break it by saying 357, but you're still using that original, a version of that original hypothesis. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Say like that you think it goes up by two or something like that. Yes. You're like very few people go back and try to break their own hypothesis. And that's the point of confirmation bias. Let's move on from that experiment.

37:13The point of confirmation bias that this shows, if you actually can understand it from other people than us, is that we tend to take our initial ideas, our beliefs in a lot of cases, and look for information that supports those and discard information that doesn't support it. Right. And that's, of course, you know, I mentioned politics a minute ago. That's where you most firmly see that these days is you are in a media bubble, probably. I don't know a ton of people that get their news sources from completely disparate points of view. And news these days that you're getting is so a lot of it is so slanted to begin with.

37:53It's probably not even the best example anymore to use. But you're probably a long way of saying you're probably going to be seeking out news that confirms your beliefs because you don't want your beliefs challenged. Yes. I mean, I like everybody else. I have trouble with that as well. But I have to boast Yumi is actually really good about getting news from different sources. Yeah. And one reason that I find it difficult to do is because I have like physical reactions sometimes. Yeah. And that is a thing. That's one of the reasons why they think we use confirmation bias is because it sucks to have your beliefs challenged, right?

38:27It's really difficult to overcome that. And there's this thing called belief perseverance, which is even when your beliefs are challenged with, say, like an indisputable fact, you can still use confirmation bias to preserve that belief. Because we usually attach our identity or build our identity around our beliefs. That's who we are. So it's like we're being personally attacked. And then even more than that, there's the backfire effect. Right. Did you see that? I did not. So the backfire effect says that in the in the face of being presented with information that is that that basically counters your own beliefs, it can make you actually solidify your original incorrect belief in the first place.

39:12Right. You you'll you'll believe it even more strongly, even though you've just been given facts that contradict it. So we really, really hang on to our beliefs as much as possible. And that is a huge, huge thing that humans trip over. Confirmation bias is probably the granddaddy of all biases, I think. Yeah, that's why I saved it for last. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of reasons people do this. You might be protecting yourself, like your self-esteem, because otherwise you're admitting that you may have been wrong about something. and it takes a big person to do that. You want to believe that you're right about stuff.

39:54And it also might just be difficult to process more than one hypothesis at once. It might just be a little too brain-breaking. Yeah, because once you lock into an explanation, your brain just, it's like, no, we've got it. We don't have to figure this other thing out. Homeostasis, homeostasis, you know? It is very hard to entertain something that is counter to what we already think is true. That's right. All right, everyone. As you can tell by the clock, we are taking our second break. This is a long one, and we're going to come back and talk about behavioral economics right after this. Well, wait, before we do that, let's try to explain this confirmation bias study again.

40:30Yeah, we should. All right, we'll be right back.

40:52What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated.

41:29Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

42:03Okay, I promised to talk about behavioral economics. A lot of the work that Tversky and Kahneman did was super applicable and kind of revolutionary in a lot of ways for the world of economics. and how people buying behavior is affected. They didn't invent it. Like Adam Smith wrote about stuff like this. And starting about World War II is when they started really kind of homing in on stuff like this, like using mathematical models. And it all kind of started with the assumption that people and companies and organizations are really just trying to pursue their self-interest at the end of the day.

42:41Yeah, and they're going to make the most rational decision. Yeah. And they were like, yes, we know people make irrational decisions, but these are outliers. Like if you take all of the information or data in aggregate, you'll see that humans generally try to make the most rational decision. That's just not true. People don't do that. We make all sorts of irrational decisions that very frequently run counter to our own best interests. and again, we'll even reject stuff like information that would help us make decisions to our own best interests if they counter our beliefs. So there's a guy named Richard Thaler who ended up becoming a colleague of Dversky and Kahneman.

43:23And he took some of their papers and he realized that these mistakes, these cognitive biases, they can be predictable, right? You can actually basically map how somebody's going to make a bad decision. And this became the basis of behavioral economics. Yeah, he well, let's talk about this. This prospect theory, because this was from Tversky and Kahneman, it was an article from 1979 from this idea of prospect theory, colon, and analysis of decision under risk. And Livia says it's probably the most cited economics paper of all time. Like this was a revolutionary landmark paper and they didn't write a ton of papers for researchers.

44:07They did like eight total, which just shows what an outsized impact they had. But they talk about in this paper, a lot of attitudes about risk. One is loss aversion, which is the idea that you're going to experience more emotional suffering when you lose money, then you will gain happiness if you gain something. So you may pass up an offer that gives you equal odds of winning 25 or losing 20. There was another example I think kind of gets it across more is there was an experiment in 1996 where they gave participants a lottery ticket and before you scratched it off or whatever, let's say it was a scratch off, they said, all right, well, hold on.

44:49Before you do that, I'll give you another lottery ticket plus$10 in cash. And for no logical reason at all, people tended to think that that first ticket was the one, even though it was a lottery ticket. There was no difference at all. They would turn down that extra$10. I think less than 50 % of them took that deal. Yeah, because in giving away or trading that first ticket, they risked a loss, even though the gain was right there. Just trading the ticket, you got an extra$10, right? Yeah. That's fairly irrational. We also have a lot of trouble with rare events. Yeah. We tend to overestimate them.

45:30It can be a positive event. It can be a negative event. But we're really bad at probabilities and statistics. And this is essentially it's like you won't let your kid walk to school because you're afraid of your kid being kidnapped. even though the chance of your kid being kidnapped is just ridiculously low. It's technically irrational, even though very few people would fault you for that. But it's still an irrational decision. Yeah, for sure. We talked about that in the, well, was it? Free range kids? Maybe. I can't remember. It tied in with the satanic panic and stuff like that, I think. Definitely did.

46:13Back in the day. Relative rather than absolute terms. That is a theory, a monetary theory where, and this is a great example, you might drive an extra 10 minutes in a car to buy a shirt that you know is selling the shirt for$20 rather than the one closer to you that sells it for$30. But you're not going to do that because that saves you$10. You won't save$20 on a car even though you may even have to drive five minutes down the road because you're like, oh, it's$20, the car's$20 ,000. But it's really a relative, you know, absolute thing is you're saving twice as much money as you did on that T-shirt purchase.

46:50Right. But it's like you said, it's all relative. Yeah. Again, totally irrational. But all this stuff relates to economics. And like you said, this stuff can be replicated. There was a 2020 study that looked at the prospect theory in particular. And this major study was conducted in 19 countries in 13 different languages and held up. Not bad. No, that's not bad at all. And so it's not just economics. It's not just being exploited by the wine list or, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken or something like that to make you buy their stuff. This actually, this can have like life and death consequences too.

47:34Although I guess so can wine and Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know what you're going to get at Kentucky Fried Chicken? What? Pepsi. That's right. You will get some Pepsi. You know how I know that? Because you just had Kentucky Fried Chicken? I did. After our tour, I was a little tired and needed just some fried chicken, so I got fried chicken. What do you get, just the original or extra crispy? Because you're crazy if you don't get extra crispy. I get extra crispy, but they were out. They could satisfy. I got the three-piece. They had two more pieces of extra crispy, and they asked if one piece of OR was available.

48:09And I was like, yeah, sure. I'm not going to not eat a piece of chicken. It is good. They do chicken right. Yeah, they do. Did you get the mashed potatoes and gravy? You know it, buddy. Times two and extra biscuit. I went all in. It was a rare eating frenzy. Did you drink a Pepsi? I did. Awesome. Well, that all fits somehow. I don't know how, but it somehow fits this episode. So where I was saying that this can be life and death is with medicine. because although doctors have God complexes and like to present themselves as infallible, they are quite fallible. They're humans and they can suffer the same cognitive biases as us, but they have your life in their hands.

48:53We rarely have others' lives in our hands. Yeah. Do you watch the show The Pit? I tried and it just did not grab me. I gave it like 10 minutes, but I hear nothing but good things. Yeah. I mean, I really like it. I've never been a hospital show guy, so this is kind of one of my first forays into it, but I like it a lot. I haven't started season two, but I noticed when reading through these bias, like medical biases, that they do, or at least Noah Wiley does a really good job on the show with these younger residents trying to bust through and a lot of this stuff comes up. He doesn't say, hey, that's affect heuristic.

49:29He just will talk about what that is and now that I know the definitions, I'm like, oh, what he's talking about is an outcome bias or an anchoring bias. it's fairly interesting. Yeah, rather than say like being presented with a really high price for a bottle of wine to make the other overpriced wine seem like a bargain, this can be like your first lab work comes back and that forms the anchoring bias impression of your condition. And even as new lab work comes back, that doctor may fail to adjust their view of your condition because they're not taking into account this new stuff. They're giving more weight to that original number.

50:10So, yeah, and that's just the anchoring bias, the way that it can affect. Like you said, there's all sorts of other ways for it to happen, and all of it can result in poorer outcomes for patients just because their doctors are humans and we don't really approach cognitive biases in a really methodical or deliberate way. Yeah. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, they do this so much on the show. the show could be called Medical Confirmation Bias. Nice. The show, because you see it all the time. Outcome bias is when a shift in the patient's health, you're convinced is the result of a treatment.

50:46Like it's because of that thing I did or affect heuristic that I mentioned, an emotional reaction to a patient, you know, kind of overrunning, you know, deliberating on this thing in a logical way. This happens all the time on this show. Yeah, well, another field that it happens with this forensic science, which we've gone to great lengths to kind of point out is junk in the most, in most cases. And a lot of that junk is just based on cognitive biases. Yeah, for sure. I mean, certainly the way they do lineups is flawed. I mean, the way they, I feel like you're right. We've done this a lot on the, on the show.

51:22The way they have done a lot of this is super flawed. And I think maybe they're looking at it some, but not a lot. No. um so if you want to fight cognitive bias in your own mind chuck what do you do what do you do well there's a list of good tips here and i think these are pretty good tips um the first one is just being aware that you have these which is something that we've already kind of kind of worked through on this episode except for you of course because you don't have these sure um but studies show that like just being aware it's not one of those things where like, well, being aware is half the problem.

51:59It's like being aware seems like 2 % of the problem. Yeah. It's like you're aware that you have an unconscious bias. It doesn't make you understand the bias. You just know that they're there, right? That's the problem with is unconscious. What else? There are some like actual things you can do, like delay decision-making. Like don't come to snap judgments. Go get more information. Go get information from a contradictory source or different source or something like that. Um, and then it like kind of tied into that, you can have like personal, like rules. Like if there's a big decision, you will not make that decision until you've slept on it.

52:40Yeah. For example, um, don't buy a TV unless your friend says, yeah, good idea. Uh, try and consider your past experience for sure. Uh, because optimism bias could come into play. like, hey, worked out last time. Yeah. Like, why would I take more time this time? Yeah, and that's another way that you can kind of do that. An exercise you can do is write down your expectations for an outcome and then go back and look at it afterward and see if you were right or not. That can kind of help you realize like, I do kind of tend toward the optimism bias. Yeah, because I believe that was one of the other biases is even, like it's hard to recognize because you're biased and that you misremember what you thought going into it.

53:24So writing it down, that's a good one. Right. But if you're super, super unconsciously biased, you might be like, someone else wrote this in my handwriting. I've never been this wrong. What about Thomas Bayes in Bayesian reasoning? So he was a minister from the 18th century, and he basically came up with a standardized formula for taking into account the probability of an outcome, right? That things aren't essentially... So I saw this on lesswrong.org, founded by one of the guys who wrote, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, about AI, Eliezer Yukowski. The whole point of lesswrong.org is to overcome your biases in a methodical way.

54:04And they love Bayesian reasoning. And it basically says there's no such thing as something is just true. Everything is just a probability. And you can kind of try to determine how probable something is based on whatever evidence you can gather. about it just basically going through life like that you know who hates that website who l-e-s-r-o-n-g that dude who started his own personal comedy website lesswrong.com that's right he's just getting smashed what else chuck um what else is i cultivate a growth mindset that's a big one hey i make mistakes i screw things up and like i need to recognize that and try and grow from that rather than, you know, just being confirmed with my own biases constantly.

54:56Yeah, maybe like looking around at some of the ways that you're commonly exploited, say like by advertisers, like scarcity is one. When somebody says act now, supplies are limited, they're creating a scarcity mindset in you. Social proof, basically like these people like this, so you probably should too. And you're like, oh, I should like that too. And then two other things I saw, there's something called cognitive bias modification, I think is what it is. You can use this for like treating anxiety, right? Like people like tend to seek out negative facial expressions. Oh, yeah. And this treatment is like, like here's a thousand frowny faces.

55:41Find the smiley face in there and just screen after screen. You're looking for the smiley face and you're training your brain to stop putting as much weight on negative facial expressions. Just using like basically exploiting your cognitive bias to get over your cognitive bias. Oh, wow. And then the last thing, Chuck, is apparently AI are starting to show signs of emergent cognitive biases because they use heuristics too. So they're starting to make cognitive, they're starting to make errors in judgment in predictable ways, which are cognitive biases, just like humans. Rob Zombie, more human than human.

56:23That's right. You got anything else? I got nothing else. This is a good one. This is fun, Chuck. Yeah, I like these. Well, since Chuck and I both like this episode, that means we have no choice but for listener mail to be triggered right now. I'm going to call this follow-up on Sebastopol because I wondered what the connection there was. Hey guys, because if you didn't listen, Sebastopol, California, and we were talking about the Sevastopol in the Crimean War, and I was like, there's no way that's a coincidence. And it's not. Hey guys, listening to the podcast on the Light Brigade from Sonoma County, our Sebastopol was named after Sevastopol.

57:04And here's a little information. The settlement was apparently originally named Pine Grove, and the name changed to Sebastopol, was attributed to a bar fight in the 1850s, which allegedly compared by a bystander to the long siege of the seaport of Sebastopol during the Crimean War. Wow. So the original name survives in the name of the Pine Grove General Store downtown only. And that is it. there's also the Russian River there, Russian River Valley. So apparently there is some Russian influence in that area, which I didn't know about. And that is from Marsha Ford. Yeah. Also, we want to apologize to all of our Iron Maiden fans who wrote in to be like, dude, that song, The Trooper, is about that whole battle.

57:52Yeah, I didn't know. I like Iron Maiden, but I didn't have as much shame upon my head as you. But you didn't. Reading the lyrics, it doesn't say, you know, Crimean War in charge of the Light Brigade, does it? I don't know. I haven't heard it in a while. I'm a big fan of the poster. I love the poster a lot. Yeah, me too. Well, sorry, all of you Iron Maiden fans out there. We'll try to do better next time. Yeah, missed opportunity. Who was that that wrote in about Sebastopol? That was Marsha, I believe. Thanks, Marsha. Marsha, Marsha, Marsha, we really appreciate you. And if you want to be like Marsha, you can email us as well.

58:30send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

58:37Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

58:53You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers, most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.