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
Another aspect of the unconscious is that it will always seek out the path of least resistance.
Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable. When we say, “I should have known that would happen,” or, “I should have seen it coming,” we are succumbing to hindsight bias.
hindsight bias
Earlier I discussed the bewildering variety of priming effects, in which your thoughts and behavior may be influenced by stimuli to which you pay no attention at all, and even by stimuli of which you are completely unaware. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by
... See morepriming effects
The opposite of armchair quarterback syndrome is impostor syndrome, where competence exceeds confidence.
Anchors can even influence how you think your life is going. In one experiment, college students were asked two questions: (a) How happy are you? (b) How often are you dating?
the anchoring effect
My favorite bias is the “I’m not biased”25 bias, in which people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap.26