This article discusses common mental errors, including survivorship bias, loss aversion, availability heuristic, anchoring, and confirmation bias, which can hinder decision-making.
Numerous psychology studies show that we often underestimate the importance of easily recallable events and underestimate the importance of difficult recalling ones. This illusory correlation is a common mistake. This article discusses a simple strategy to identify hidden assumptions and prevent such correlations.
To overcome procrastination and improve long-term choices, it's crucial to prioritize our present selves over our future selves. By directing our present self to act in the best interest of our future selves, we can beat procrastination and make better decisions. This article outlines three simple ways to achieve this.
Survivorship bias is a common issue in popular online media, where people tend to focus on the winners in a particular area and learn from them, neglecting the losers who employ the same strategy. This bias can lead to overvaluing the strategies, tactics, and advice of one survivor while overlooking the thousands of athletes who never made it to the top. For example, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of school and became billionaires, but it's possible that Branson succeeded despite his path. For every Branson, Gates, and Zuckerberg, there are thousands of other entrepreneurs with failed projects, debt-heavy bank accounts, and half-finished degrees. Survivorship bias not only implies that a strategy may not work well for one individual but also suggests that we don't know if the strategy works at all. When the winners are remembered and the losers are forgotten, it becomes difficult to determine if a particular strategy leads to success.
An illusory correlation occurs when we over-emphasize one outcome and ignore others. For example, when visiting New York City, we may remember incidents like a rude subway train, a rude waiter, or a bad street direction. However, we forget about the non-events, such as meals eaten when the waiter acted perfectly normal or the hundreds of people who didn't cut you off. This makes it easier to remember the times someone acted rudely than the times we dined happily or took the subway in peace. Brain science has shown that we tend to overestimate the importance of events we can easily recall and underestimate the importance of events we have trouble recalling. The easier it is to remember, the more likely we are to create a strong relationship between two weakly related or not related events.
We often prioritize our present selves over our future selves, enjoying immediate benefits in the present without considering the long-term costs. For example, the immediate benefits of eating a donut, spending money today, and unhindered fossil fuel usage are immediate, but the long-term costs of these choices may not be apparent until years later. When considering these problems in the distant future, our choices often change. In one year, we may choose to be overweight and eating donuts or healthy and exercising consistently. However, when making these choices today, we often discount the long-term costs and overvalue the immediate benefits of unproductive behaviors.
This phenomenon is called the Present You vs. Future You problem, as Future You on long-term benefits, while Present You to overvalue immediate benefits. This presents a problem where future decisions are made based on long-term goals, while present decisions are made based on immediate benefits.
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