What if I told you that the reason you snapped
at your coworker this morning and the reason
you bought that needlessly expensive TV last
weekend are actually driven by the exact same
evolutionary machinery? Yeah, I mean, we really
tend to think of our minds as these pristine,
completely rational engines. You take in facts,
you weigh the options, you make a logical choice.
Right, exactly. But the reality is you are operating
on this bizarre set of hidden rules, just these
invisible forces pulling at your mental steering
wheel every second of the day. It is a profound
illusion that we're in total control of our decision
making. If you look at the research, what we
call rational thought is actually heavily filtered
through systematic deviations. You see it across
almost every aspect of human cognition. Which
is exactly why we're doing this deep dive today.
We're taking a massive, meticulously sourced
compilation of cognitive biases drawn from this
comprehensive Wikipedia database, and we're going
to trace the chronological life cycle of a single
thought. All right, instead of just reading you
a list of academic terms, we're taking you from
the second you gather information to how you
make a choice to how you, well, inevitably justify
it. And finally, how you remember it. OK, let's
unpack this. Are these biases actually just brain
bugs or are they features masquerading as bugs
because it feels like our brains wouldn't evolve
over millions of years just to be consistently
wrong? That tension right there is actually at
the center of modern cognitive psychology. You
have prominent researchers. like Gurdjieger Renser
from The Source Material, who actively argue
against labeling these biases merely as errors.
Oh, really? Yeah. Gurdjieger's view is that these
are actually highly efficient mental shortcuts.
Heuristics. The brain is essentially a cognitive
miser. A cognitive miser, I like that. Right,
because it takes a massive amount of biological
energy to process every single variable in a
room or in a complex decision. So to survive,
the brain developed these workarounds to produce
decisions rapidly. So it's less about finding
the perfect truth and more about finding a like
a good enough truth so you don't get eaten by
a tiger while you're doing the math. Precisely.
And researchers generally divide these workarounds
into two categories. You have your cold biases,
which are just noisy information processing shortcuts.
Like literal glitches in how the brain handles
data. Exactly. And then you have hot biases,
which are motivational. Those are the ones driven
by your ego, your emotions, or wishful thinking.
OK, let's put this into practice and start at
the very beginning of the thought lifecycle.
So, estimation. You walk into a situation, and
before you can act, you have to gather data.
According to the 2020 classification by DiMara
and colleagues, estimation is that very first
task. Right. So tell me why, when I walk into
an electronics store, they always put the $3
,000 television right at the front of the aisle,
even though they know almost nobody's going to
buy it. Well, because they're exploiting a cold
bias known as anchoring. When your brain enters
a novel situation, it desperately needs a baseline
to measure everything else against. Because without
a baseline, evaluating the price of a TV just
takes too much cognitive processing. Exactly.
So your brain grabs the very first piece of numerical
information it encounters, that $3 ,000 price
tag. That becomes your anchor. So when I walk
10 feet down the aisle and see an $800 TV, my
brain isn't evaluating whether $800 is actually
a fair price for those specific components. No,
not at all. My brain is just screaming, wow,
compared to $3 ,000, this is an absolute steal.
Yes. The anchor fundamentally skews your perception
of value. Your brain isn't doing the objective
math. It's doing relative math based on an entirely
arbitrary starting point. It's basically a rapid
processing trick that marketers have completely
weaponized against us. It really is. And that
sets up the next phase. You've estimated the
value, and now you have to make a decision. Okay,
let's talk about the friction between what I
plan to do and what I actually do. Because on
Sunday night, I always plan to eat salads all
week, hit the gym, and be highly productive.
We all do. But by Tuesday at 2 p .m., I am eating
a donut and scrolling through social media. Why
is my brain actively sabotaging the logical plan
it just made? You are experiencing hyperbolic
discounting or present bias. From an evolutionary
standpoint, abstract future planning is a very
recent luxury. Because for most of human history,
tomorrow wasn't guaranteed, right? Exactly. If
you found a source of dense calories, like honey
or fruit, you consumed it immediately. So the
brain heavily discounts the value of a future
reward in favor of an immediate, tangible payoff.
That makes total sense, like a theoretical salad
next week doesn't keep you alive today. The source
material highlights a classic study on this that
maps perfectly to your Sunday night salad plan.
When researchers asked participants to choose
their snacks for the coming week, 74 % of people
chose fruit. Because they're operating in that
abstract, logical, future -planning mode. Right.
But when those same people were asked to choose
a snack for the current day, 70 % of them chose
chocolate. Wow. 70%. Yeah. The immediate visceral
reward completely overrides the long -term logical
planning center of the brain. Okay, so I've anchored
on a bad price and I've chosen the immediate
reward over the long -term benefit. Now I have
to deal with the aftermath. Let's talk about
how we value things after we've put effort into
them. Ah, the Ikea effect. Yes. The research
claims we overvalue things, we build ourselves.
But I want to push back on this a little bit.
If I spend three hours putting together a bookshelf
and I feel proud of it, isn't that just a healthy
sense of accomplishment? Why is that a cognitive
bias? What's fascinating here is that it becomes
a bias when that internal sense of pride warps
your objective assessment of reality. It's a
form of effort justification. OK, how so? Well,
if you build a bookshelf and it is wobbly, structurally
unsound and objectively terrible, but you still
genuinely believe it's a high -quality piece
of furniture simply because you tighten the screws
yourself, your judgment has deviated from reality.
So I am essentially hallucinating the quality
of the chair to justify the three hours of my
life I just lost building it. Exactly. It ties
into a broader set of biases related to self
-perspective and baseline comparisons. Your brain
has a vested interest in proving to itself that
its expenditure of energy was worthwhile. Because
if I admit the chair is garbage, I have to admit
I wasted valuable time and effort. Right. And
to protect you from that psychological loss,
your brain alters the baseline of how you evaluate
the object. We are working incredibly hard to
protect our own egos, and that transitions us
into the next phase of our thought -life -cycle
hypothesis assessment. We've made our decisions
and now we have to make sense of the world around
us. How do we test our reality? Very poorly.
Mostly due to the illusion of explanatory depth.
We walk around with the profound belief that
we understand that the world works much better
than we actually do. And the research notes this
is specifically true for explanatory knowledge,
right? Rather than just factual knowledge. Yeah,
we confuse our familiarity with an object with
an actual understanding of its mechanics. Here's
where it gets really interesting. It's exactly
like thinking you completely understand how a
zipper works. Oh, that's a great example. Right,
because you use one every single day. But if
I handed you a pen and a piece of paper right
now, told you to draw the physical mechanics
of the interlocking teeth, you'd probably freeze.
Your brain gave you the feeling of understanding
without any of the actual data. That is a brilliant
visualization, and think about the evolutionary
utility of that illusion. If we walked around
acutely aware of how little we understood about
our environment, we would be paralyzed by anxiety
and indecision. So the illusion of depth allows
us to operate confidently in a highly complex
world without having to process the mechanics
of every zipper or engine or societal structure
we interact with. Exactly. But that confidence
becomes dangerous when we combine it with confirmation
bias, doesn't it? We have this illusion that
we understand things and then we actively seek
out information that proves we are right, while
aggressively ignoring anything that proves we
are wrong. Confirmation bias is one of the most
robust findings in psychology. But if we connect
this to the bigger picture, we shouldn't just
dismiss it as a useless processing error. The
source text brings up a fascinating controversy
in the scientific community regarding this. Wait,
really? Some people don't think it's an error.
Right. Some researchers argue that confirmation
bias, specifically when interacting with other
people, is actually a highly evolved social skill.
Wait, how could ignoring facts to preserve your
own worldview possibly be a valuable social skill?
Think about it in terms of tribal cohesion. If
you meet someone new and you ask them leading
questions that confirm their own assumptions
about themselves or the world, you are validating
their identity. You are reducing friction. Oh,
wow. I never thought about it like that. Yeah.
In a prehistoric environment, social cohesion
and establishing quick alliances were vastly
more important for survival than objective truth.
Confirming someone else's bias is an incredibly
fast way to build a social bond. So, nodding
along to an irrational belief might have literally
kept our ancestors from being exiled from the
group. That completely flips the script on how
we view these glitches. It really does. But let's
look at what happens when the cohesion breaks
down. We've assessed our reality, and now something
goes wrong. We enter the phase of causal attribution.
We have to assign blame. And this is where we
see a massive double standard in human cognition,
primarily through the actor -observer bias and
the fundamental attribution error. Meaning we
evaluate our own actions using entirely different
metrics than we use for other people. Exactly.
Give me an example of how that plays out in daily
life. Okay, imagine you were driving to work
and you aggressively cut someone off in traffic.
How do you justify it? I tell myself it's because
I'm running late, the kids were screaming this
morning, and I just had a momentary lapse in
judgment because of the situation. Right. You
blame the external environment. But if another
driver cuss you off in the exact same way, you
do not assume they are having a bad morning.
No, definitely not. You immediately attribute
their behavior to their innate personality. Yeah.
You assume they're just inherently a selfish,
reckless person. We give ourselves the grace
of context, but we judge everyone else as a static,
flawed character. Why does the brain do that?
Is it just pure ego protection again? It is heavily
ego protection, yes. Internalizing our own failures
is psychologically damaging, but it is also a
matter of cognitive load. Cognitive load? Yeah.
It takes a tremendous amount of mental energy
to empathize, to actively imagine the complex,
stressful situational factors that might be influencing
a stranger's behavior. It's far cheaper, glorically
speaking, to just categorize them as a jerk and
move on. Now, I imagine there are people listening
right now thinking, well, this is great. Now
that I know the fundamental attribution error
exists, I'm just not going to do it anymore.
I'm cured. Unfortunately, no. The source material
actually has a specific classification for that
exact belief. It is called the G .I. Joe Fallacy.
The G .I. Joe Fallacy. Like, knowing is half
the battle. Exactly. It's the tendency to think
that merely knowing about a cognitive bias is
enough to overcome it. We assume that awareness
equals control. But these are foundational operating
systems in the brain. You cannot simply turn
them off just because you read a Wikipedia article
about them. It's like knowing about optical illusions.
Even when you know the two lines are exactly
the same length, your eyes still force you to
see one as longer. You can't out -think the hardware.
Precisely. Which brings us to the most vulnerable
part of the thought, life cycle memory. The event
has happened. We've made our choices. We've assigned
blame. Now we have to store the experience we
transitioned into the recall phase. And the most
important thing to understand here is that human
memory is not a video camera recording objective
facts. Not even close. It feels more like a game
of telephone we play with ourselves over time.
That is an incredibly accurate way to describe
it. One of the primary mechanisms dictating how
we store information is the peak -end rule. Okay,
what is that? Well, we do not perceive the sum
total of an experience. We do not average out
every minute of an event. Instead, the brain
heavily waits just two specific moments, the
absolute emotional peak of the experience and
how it ended. So if I go on a two -week vacation
and the first 13 days are miserable, it's raining,
I lose my luggage, the hotel is awful, but on
the very last day the sun comes out, I have an
incredible meal, and I watch a breathtaking sunset.
Your brain is going to average the peak misery
with that amazing ending, and you will likely
remember the overall trip as pretty good. Just
because of the last day? Yes. Because again,
the brain is a cognitive miser. Storing a minute
-by -minute emotional ledger of a 14 -day trip
takes up too much space. Evolutionarily, all
you really need to remember from an experience
is the moment of highest threat or highest reward,
the peak, and the final outcome, the end. Because
if the outcome was positive, the brain tags the
entire experience as a net positive to save processing
power. So what does this all mean for us today?
Because how is that memory storage changing now
that we don't even have to rely on our own biological
hard drives? The sources talk about the Google
effect, the fact that we are rapidly forgetting
information because we know we can just pull
it up on a search engine. Are we actively outsourcing
our brains? This raises an important question.
We are outsourcing, but it's an extension of
a deeply rooted biological process. To understand
the Google effect, you have to look at what the
research calls Q -dependent forgetting. Cue dependent
forgetting. Yeah, our memory is heavily tied
to context and external triggers If the context
isn't there the memory is incredibly hard to
retrieve Furthermore the verbatim effect dictates
that our brains rarely store exact copies of
data We remember the gist or the general meaning
of a conversation Rather than the verbatim wording
because storing the gist is cheaper than storing
the exact transcript Exactly. So when you introduce
a tool like a search engine the brain optimizes
If the brain knows that the gist is all it needs
to navigate a situation and the exact verbatim
data is safely stored on a server that you can
access in three seconds, it clears the cache.
Wow. It stops wasting biological energy trying
to remember facts that the environment is holding
for you. But outsourcing the facts leaves us
incredibly vulnerable, doesn't it? If we only
remember the gist and we rely on external cues,
how easily can those memories be altered? Alarmingly
easily. This is the danger of the misinformation
effect. Because our memories are reconstructions
rather than recordings, they are highly susceptible
to interference from post -event information.
Like someone suggesting a detail that wasn't
there. Right. If you witness a car accident and
later someone asks you a leading question like,
how fast was the car going when it smashed into
the other car? Your brain might take the word
smashed, weave it into the reconstruction, and
actually alter your memory. To make the cars
appear to be moving faster than they were. Yes.
You will vividly remember a sequence of events
that never actually happened simply because the
cue changed. We're basically retroactively editing
our own history without realizing it, and that
brings us to the final task in our life cycle
opinion reporting. We've taken this heavily edited,
warped memory, and now we're going to communicate
our beliefs to other people. And this is where
we run straight into naive realism. Naive realism.
Define that for me. It is the profound, unshakable
belief. that we see the world objectively. We
assume that our perceptions are direct reflections
of reality. And the dangerous corollary to this
is that if we believe we are entirely objective,
then anyone who disagrees with us must be uninformed,
irrational, or heavily biased. Exactly. It creates
an impossible barrier for communication. Because
if I think my warped memory is object to fact,
I'm not going to listen to your perspective.
Which leads right into the ultimate blinders,
the bias blind spot. Oh, the bias blind spot
is fascinating. It's incredibly easy for us to
spot all these glitches in other people, right?
I can clearly see when my coworker is anchoring
on a bad number or falling for the fundamental
attribution error. But you are physically incapable
of seeing those exact same biases operating in
your own mind. And when you do finally share
your opinions, you are further constrained by
social desirability bias. Yes, because your memory
is just a flexible representation, you will unconsciously
warp the details as you speak to fit your current
social needs. You highlight actions that make
you look good to the group and suppress the details
that make you look bad. The reporting itself
becomes another layer of distortion. When you
lay it out sequentially. It's a miracle we managed
to function as a society at all. It really is.
So let's pull all the way back and look at the
terrifying life cycle we've just mapped out.
It starts with your brain grabbing onto an arbitrary
anchor just to save energy. Right. You make a
choice based on immediate gratification because
your ancient biology doesn't care about tomorrow.
You build a terrible chair and hallucinate that
it's a masterpiece to protect your ego. Yep.
Effort justification. You blindly assume you
understand how zippers and complex systems work,
and you aggressively ignore any data that threatens
your worldview. When things go wrong, you blame
the universe for your mistakes, but you blame
your friends' personalities for theirs. The classic
fundamental attribution error. You store all
of this in a deeply flawed memory bank that only
cares about the best meal you had and the flight
home. And finally, you confidently explain your
perspective to the world, utterly convinced that
you are the only objective observer in the room.
It's a lot to take in. So why should you, the
listener, care about this massive catalog of
glitches? Because while you cannot outsmart your
own biology, the G .I. Joe fallacy guarantees
that just knowing this stuff won't cure you.
Understanding this framework gives you a diagnostic
tool. Absolutely. When you feel yourself reacting
defensively to a coworker or when you catch yourself
judging a stranger's character instead of considering
their situation, you can hit the pause button.
You can recognize the mechanism in real time.
you step out of the illusion of objectivity.
even just for a fraction of a second, to acknowledge
the evolutionary currents that are pushing your
decisions. It fosters a tremendous amount of
intellectual humility. I completely agree. And
I want to leave you with one final provocative
concept from the source material to mull over
on your own. As we've discussed, the brain relies
on these shortcuts because it is constantly trying
to offload cognitive effort. Well, buried in
the research is something called automation bias.
Ah. Automation bias. It is the human tendency
to depend excessively on automated systems. It
is so powerful that humans will actually override
their own correct decisions just because a machine
told them otherwise. It is the ultimate manifestation
of the cognitive miser. If a machine offers an
answer the brain accepts it to save energy. even
if the answer defies logic. And as we move into
a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly
doing our estimation, our hypothesis assessment,
and our recall for us, what happens to our critical
thinking? That is the million dollar question.
If our brains are biologically hardwired to take
the path of least resistance, will the AI tools
we build simply amplify our existing biases?
Or will they eventually become the objective
baseline we've never been able to achieve? Something
for you to keep in mind the next time you blindly
trust a GPS system that tells you to turn your
car directly into a lake. We may be running on
ancient hardware, but we are the ones writing
the code for what comes next. That's our deep
dive for today. Keep questioning the code, and
we will catch you on the next one.