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
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
In The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that infinite choice – whether of mutual funds, breakfast cereals or lovers – is exhausting to the human psyche and leads to greater dissatisfaction. When presented with too many choices, we are not only stunned, like a kid in the proverbial candy shop, but also less satisfied with
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a machine that tries to circumvent thinking
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.”
Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon
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, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.
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
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