Tuesday, May 19, 2020
The Optimism Bias
The Optimism Bias I lost a dollar bet yesterday. I bet my mom that the Jacksonville Jaguars would win the game, and they lost. (The good thing about this football season is that, no matter what week you read this post, the first sentence will most likely still be true.) This is the fourth week Iâve taken the Jags to win, and the fourth week Iâve lost. Yet, on Friday, when my (shark) mom asks me what I want, Iâm almost sure to take the Jags for the win. As it turns out, Iâm not alone. Tali Sharot write The Optimism Bias, a book on why humans almost always view the future as hopeful and sunny. She has studied hundreds of subjects, young and old, and found that no matter the odds, we always believe that tomorrow will be better. Weâre apparently hard wired that way. âWe hugely underestimate the likelihood of divorce, cancer and unemployment,â she writes. ââWe expect to be healthier than the average person and more successful than [our] peers.â Sharot goes on to ask her readers to rate themselves in the following characteristics: Getting along well with others Leadership ability Logical thinking Driving ability Go ahead â" rate yourself. Are you in the lower 25% of the U.S. population? The 25th -50th quartile? The 50th â" 75th quartile? Or are you in the top 25%? A 1970âs survey found that 85 percent of people rated themselves above average in getting along with people. My own experience reveals that roughly 100 percent of drivers rate themselves as above average. We know that thatâs impossible. The Bell curve (aka Normal Distribution) teaches us that 50 percent of us, are, by definition, average. Yet we persist in rating ourselves higher than average. Interestingly, while we canât identify our own biases, weâre excellent in perceiving them in someone else. That sentence alone explains a lot of woe in the human condition. But thatâs another post. The bias in rating ourselves as above average may explain why we take rejection so personally when were in a job search. Its not just losing the opportunity; were confused and saddened by the companys inability to recognize standout talent when they see it. Another trick our brain plays on us is called âchoice blindness blindness.â Sharot describes this as the phenomenon wherein we think weâre making a rational choice, but really canât tell the difference. In one supermarket taste test, for instance, shoppers were asked to choose the jam they preferred â" was it the blue jar or the red jar? Shoppers made the choice, then were given the opportunity to taste their choice again and describe why they liked it. What they didnât know was that the testers had substituted the jam they didnât choose for the winner. Almost none of the shoppers were able to recognize the swap; they happily gave several reasons why this jam was superior to the one theyâd rejected. Of course, they were actually describing the rejected jam as they said things like âthis one is less obviously sweet.â Sharotâs point is that we may be wasting a lot of time carefully justifying choices. When people were asked to rationalize the reasons they chose a specific art poster for their home, they scored lower in satisfaction months later than people whoâd made a quick, unthinking choice. In other words, you may think you have great, well thought out reasons for taking a job or deciding on a course of action. The truth is, you might be better off sometimes to flip a coin. Why is more thinking less helpful? It may be because we focus on things we can articulate, instead of what will matter more in the long run, but be harder to understand or say. Whatever the reasons, our bias toward thinking weâre smart is hard to overcome. Meanwhile, Iâve studied the stats against our upcoming opponents, and Iâm taking the Jags to win by three. Can I borrow a dollar?
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