mind traps
“In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life (...) we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”
from Think Again by Adam Grant
We fall victim to the fat-cat syndrome,32 resting on our laurels instead of pressure-testing our beliefs.
fat-cat syndrome
Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
survivorship bias
As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions:13 preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set of tools. We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter
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Self-Serving Bias: This is the tendency to blame external forces when bad things happen and to credit ourselves when good things happen. It is based on our lack of development of the three core capacities—locus of control, scope of considering, and source of agency. According to this bias, when I win a poker hand, it is due to my skill at reading
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That sort of error is called “statistical bias.” When your method of learning about the world is biased, learning more may not help. Acquiring more data can even consistently worsen a biased prediction.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: The most common way in which people plan vacations is to decide where and when they want to travel, and only later do they consider the fares. (More on the fallacy of this approach and a superior strategy in Chapter 3.) Once we’ve mentally committed ourselves to a specific trip, not going or going somewhere else doesn’t feel like
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