Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed — How to Foolproof Your Mind

From LiteMind.com

Our minds set up many traps for
us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our
ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making
stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may,
eventually, get us into trouble.

Here are the first 5 of the most
harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them.

1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First
Thoughts

“Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million?
What’s your best estimate?” Researchers asked this question to a group
of people, and the estimates were seldom too far off 35 million. The
same question was posed to a second group, but this time using 100
million as the starting point. Although both figures were arbitrary, the
estimates from the ’100 million’ group were, without fail,
concomitantly higher than those in the ’35 million’ group. (for the
curious, here’s the answer.)

Lesson: Your starting
point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions,
ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts.

This
trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many
occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a
higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for
example.

What can you do about it?

• Always
  view a problem from different perspectives. Avoid being stuck
  with a single starting point. Work on your problem
  statement before going down a solution path.


• Think
  on your own before consulting others. Get as much data as
  possible and explore some conclusions by yourself before getting
  influenced by other people’s anchors.


• Seek information
  from a wide variety of sources. Get many opinions and broaden
  your frame of reference. Avoid being limited to a single point of view.

2.
The Status Quo Trap: Keeping on Keeping On

In one experiment a
group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a
decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. They were
then told that they could effortlessly exchange one gift for the other.
Logic tells us that about half of people would not get the gift they
prefered and would hence exchange it, but in fact only 10% did!

We
tend to repeat established behaviors, unless we are given the right
incentives to entice us to change them. The status quo
automatically has an advantage over every other alternative.

What
can you do about it?

• Consider the status quo as
  just another alternative. Don’t get caught in the ‘current vs.
  others’ mindset. Ask yourself if you would choose your current situation
  if it weren’t the status quo.


• Know your objectives.
  Be explicit about them and evaluate objectively if the current state of
  affairs serves them well.


• Avoid exaggerating switching
  costs. They frequently are not as bad as we tend to assume.

3.
The Sunk Cost Trap: Protecting Earlier Choices

You pre-ordered a
non-refundable ticket to a basketball game. On the night of the game,
you’re tired and there’s a blizzard raging outside. You regret the fact
that you bought the ticket because, frankly, you would prefer to stay at
home, light up your fireplace and comfortably watch the game on TV.
What would you do?

It may be hard to admit, but staying at home is
the best choice here. The money for the ticket is already gone
regardless of the alternative you choose: it’s a sunk cost,
and it shouldn’t influence your decision.

(This
example is from an earlier article which focuses entirely on the sunk
cost effect. Check it
out if you want to know more.)

What can you do about it?

• Be
  OK with making mistakes. Examine why admitting to earlier
  mistakes distresses you. Nobody is immune to errors, so you shouldn’t
  make a big deal out of it — just make sure you learn from them!


• Listen
  to people who were not involved in the earlier decisions. Find
  people who are not emotionally committed to past decisions and ask
  their opinion.


• Focus on your goals. We make
  decisions in order to reach goals. Don’t become attached to the
  particular series of steps you took towards that goal; always consider
  how you can better fulfill that goal from now on.

4.
The Confirmation Trap: Seeing What You Want to See

You feel the
stock market will be going down and that now may be a good time to sell
your stock. Just to be reassured of your hunch, you call a friend that
has just sold all her stock to find out her reasons.

Congratulations,
you have just fallen into the Confirmation Trap: looking
for information that will most likely support your initial point of
view — while conveniently avoiding information that challenges
it.

This confirmation bias affects not only where you go to
collect evidence, but also how you interpret the data: we are much less
critical of arguments that support our initial ideas and much more
resistant to arguments against them.

No matter how neutral we
think we are when first tackling a decision, our brains always decide —
intuitively — on an alternative right away, making us subject to this
trap virtually at all times.

What can you do about it?

• Expose
  yourself to conflicting information. Examine all evidence with
  equal rigor. Don’t be soft on disconfirmatory evidence. Know what you
  are about: Searching for alternatives or looking for reassurance!


• Get
  a devil’s advocate. Find someone you respect to argue against
  the decision you’re contemplating making. If you can’t find one, build
  the counterarguments yourself. Always consider the other positions with
  an open mind (taking into account the other mind traps we are discussing
  here, by the way).


• Don’t ask leading questions.
  When asking for advice, make neutral questions to avoid people merely
  confirming your biases. “What should I do with my stocks?” works better
  than “Should I sell my stocks today?”

5. The Incomplete
Information Trap: Review Your Assumptions

Harry is an
introverted guy. We know that he is either a librarian or a salesman.
Which one do you think he most probably is?

Of course, we may
be tempted to think he’s almost certainly a librarian. Haven’t we been
conditioned to think of salesmen as having outgoing, if not pushy,
personalities? Too bad this reasoning may be dead wrong (or at least
incomplete).

This conclusion neglects the fact that salesmen
outnumber librarians about 100 to 1. Before you even consider
Harry’s character traits, you should have assigned only a 1% chance that
he’s a librarian. (That means that even if all librarians are
introverted, all it takes is 1% of introverts among the salesmen to make
the chances higher for Harry being a salesman.)

That’s just one
example of how overlooking a simple data element can make our
intuitions go completely astray. We keep mental images —
simplifications of reality — that make we jump to conclusions before
questioning assumptions or checking whether we have enough information.

What
can you do about it?

• Make your assumptions
  explicit. Don’t take a problem statement as it is. Keep in mind
  that for every problem you’re using implicit information — your
  assumptions. It’s usually not hard to check the validity of assumptions,
  but first you need to know what they are.


• Always favor
  hard data over mental simplifications. Our preconceptions —
  such as stereotypes — can be useful in many situations, but we should
  always be careful to not over-rely on them. When given the choice,
  always prefer hard data.

 

6. The Conformity Trap: Everybody Else Is Doing It

In a series of experiments,
researchers asked students in a classroom a series of very simple
questions and, sure enough, most of them got the answers right. In
another group, they asked the same questions but this time there were
actors posing as students, purposefully pushing wrong answers. This time
around, many more students provided wrong answers based on the leads
from the researchers’ assistants.

This “herd instinct” exists — to
different degrees — in all of us. Even if we hate to admit it, other
people’s actions do heavily influence ours. We fear looking
dumb: failing along with many people is frequently not considered a big
deal, but when we fail alone we must take all the heat ourselves.
There’s always peer pressure to adopt the behaviors of the groups we’re
in.

This tendency to conform is notoriously exploited in
advertising. Businesses often sell us products not based on their
features, but by showing how popular they are: since others are
buying it in droves, why would we not join them?

Conformity is
also one of the main reasons why once a book makes into a well-known
best-sellers list, it tends to “lock in” and continue there for a long
time. People like to consume what “everybody else” is consuming.

What
can you do about it?

• Discount the influence of
  others. When analyzing information, shield yourself from
  others’ opinions — at least at first. This is the best way to decide
  without being subconsciously swayed by popular opinions.


• Beware
  “social proof”. Always raise a flag when someone tries to
  convince you arguing primarily on the popularity of a choice, instead of
  on its merit.


• Be courageous. Be willing to
  overcome obstacles and defend your viewpoints, despite their
  unpopularity. Don’t be afraid to point out that the Emperor wears no
  clothes.

7. The Illusion of Control Trap: Shooting in the
Dark

Have you noticed that the vast majority of lotto players
pick their own numbers instead of using the sometimes available
‘auto-pick’ option (where the point of sales terminal chooses the
numbers for you)? We all know that however the numbers are chosen
doesn’t change the chance of winning, so why the strong preference for
picking our own numbers?

Curiously, even in situations we clearly
can’t control, we still tend to irrationally believe that we can
somehow influence results. We just love to feel in control.

Of
course, it’s always easier to illustrate this trap with chance games,
but the tendency to overestimate our personal control of events
influences every aspect of our daily lives.

Unfortunately,
contrary to the lottery example above, the outcomes of our decisions are
usually complex and interconnected. It’s hard to assess to what extent
we’re responsible for the results we get. While some of the outcomes can
be traced back to our own choices, a part of them will surely remain
just as well out of our direct control.

What can you do about it?

• Understand
  that randomness is part and parcel of life. Although it may be
  hard to fathom or even admit it, some things are just random — in the
  sense that they don’t depend on your effort at all. Accept
  responsibility for the things you can influence, but know that for many
  others there is not much you can do. Better than assuming or expecting
  that every event is under your control is to consciously choose how you
  respond to them.


• Beware of superstitions.
  Consider how much of your decisions are based on things you cannot
  really explain. Make those unknowns explicit and put them under scrutiny
  — instead of pretending you can control them.

8. The
Coincidence Trap: We Suck at Probabilities

John Riley is a
legend. He won a one-in-a-million-chance lottery… twice!
That makes it a 1-in-a-trillion event — which means that the
lottery is rigged or maybe John must have been singled out by Lady Luck,
right?

Well, not really. Let’s try a little math: If, throughout
the years, 1000 lottery winners keep playing at least 100 times
attempting the “miracle” of winning it once more, that adds up to a
non-negligible chance of 10% that someone will make
it.

This means that the “miracle” is not only possible but
— given enough attempts — its likelihood increases to a point of
becoming almost inevitable.

Another classic
example: it takes a group of just 23 people to make it more likely
than not that two of them share the same birthday (day and month).

That’s
how unintuitive probabilities are.

What can you do about it?

• Don’t
  over-rely on gut estimates. While useful many times, gut
  estimates will sometimes be way off the mark. Make sure you
  properly discount their importance or that you understand the
  ramifications of trusting them.


• Beware of “after the
  fact” probabilities. One thing is the probability of someone
  having won the lottery twice — looking at it in retrospect. Another
  completely different thing is that a particular person — chosen
  before the outcome — wins it: that would indeed qualify as a
  one-in-a-trillion event — and would make anyone seriously doubt the
  legitimacy of that lottery.

9. The Recall Trap: Not All
Memories Are Created Equal

What’s your best guess for the
probability of a randomly selected flight ending in a fatal crash? While
many people grossly overestimate it, MIT studies show that in reality
these fatal accidents happen at a rate of only 1 in 10,000,000.

The
fact that people suck at estimating probabilities explains only
partially this tendency to mis-estimate: if you ask the same question
right after a major airplane accident, be prepared for even more
biased assessments.

What happens is we analyze
information based on experience, on what we can remember from it.
Because of that, we’re overly influenced by events that stand out from
others, such as those with highly dramatic impact or very recent ones.
The more “special” an event is, the greater the potential to distort our
thinking. Of course, no one ever bothers about the other 9,999,999
planes that arrive safely at their destinations — so there’s nothing
more natural than forgetting about them.

What can you do about
it?

• Get hard data. As usual, don’t rely on
  your memory if you don’t have to. Use it, of course, but always endeavor
  to find data that confirms or discounts your recollection as soon as
  possible.


• Be aware of your emotions. When
  analyzing information, try to emotionally isolate yourself from it, at
  least temporarily. If you’re analyzing an event, pretend it happened a
  long time ago or that it happened to someone else unrelated to you.
  Likewise, if asking for opinions, find people who are not emotionally
  involved with them or their consequences.


• Beware the
  media. The media is notorious for exaggerating the importance
  of certain events while conveniently neglecting others. Always evaluate
  information on its relevance and accuracy, and not on how much exposure
  it gets.

10. The Superiority Trap: The Average is Above
Average

A study surveyed drivers asking them to
compare their driving skills to other people in the experiment. Almost
all the participants (93%!) rated themselves as ‘above average’.

With
few exceptions, people have much inflated views of themselves.
They overestimate their skills and capabilities, leading to many errors
in judgment.

And this is the reason I decided to close this
article with this particular thinking trap. After making ourselves aware
of these many thinking traps, we may now become susceptible to falling
into a new one: the belief that we’re now immune to them.

Of
course, the first step to avoid thinking traps is awareness and
constant vigilance, but beware: it’s much, much easier to notice others
falling into these traps than us.

What can you do about it?

• Be
  humble. Always remember that everyone has blind spots (yes,
  that includes me and you)!


• Surround yourself with honest
  people. If we all have blind spots, nothing better than having
  honest people around us to point them out to us.


• Don’t
  go overboard. These ‘thinking traps’ are inherent parts of us:
  they make us human. Applying rigor and rational thinking to our
  decisions is important, but that doesn’t mean that intuition has
  completely lost its place. Don’t get me wrong: I still think that
  knowing about our own thinking traps is very useful — just don’t get too
  worked up about them.

Further Resources

These ten
thinking traps barely scratch the surface when it comes to how our
thinking can be biased. Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases has more
than 100 of these traps, making it a hard-to-beat
starting point for further learning.

The references for the
studies that back up the data in this article can be found on the
respective articles on Wikipedia, as well as on the book Smart Choices. That’s a marvelous book about decision
making, and one which I highly recommend. Another great book to check
out is Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So.