Your brain is biased
The human brain is a wondrous machine. It can sing songs, ponder the secrets of the universe, and it can make porridge. The brain of the homo sapiens is responsible for Starry Night, Mozart’s symphonies and General Relativity.
But damn, for all it’s greatness, it is one seriously fallible machine. One way of looking at the frailty of our brains, is through the lens of cognitive bias. Cognitive bias occurs when you repeatedly get things a bit wrong.
You’ll see different definitions wherever you look, but they tend to come down to this notion of there being a true, rational, objectively correct truth, and that for various reasons, the human brain often believes something else. Makes a slightly suboptimal decision. Picks the wrong cereal in the morning. Etc.
Cognitive biases come in all sorts of flavours and categories. Some are more insidious than others. Stereotyping, priming bias and self-serving bias are examples of biases that are responsible for some of the less impressive aspects of human behaviour.
I’d rather focus on some of the more amusing and quirky aspects of human decision making.
My favourite cognitive bias is the decoy effect. The good ol’ decoy effect reared its head in my life a while back, when I popped in to an ice cream store for some refreshment.
I used to absolutely love ice cream. That being said, I only liked to have a moderate amount. A couple of scoops. Enough to get some different flavours going, but not so much that I’ll be left feeling like a balloon all afternoon.
But let’s say we have just two options: one and three scoops. What do you reckon you’d get:
I’d probably be inclined to just get the single scoop. Pick a nice flavour, and enjoy. Easy. Just a single scoop of the salted caramel please :)
Now how about something more familiar:
In my experience, ice cream stores are devilish when it comes to the decoy effect. Forget the first scenario for a second. What would you do, given the prices in the image above?
If you’re like me, you’ll probably try to size up the value for money. So you’ll eye the two scoop option with great suspicion. Wow — that’s quite a hike in price. But hey — the three scoop option is just $1 more!! What a steal?! The $7 price tag somehow seems much more palatable with the crappy $6 option next to it.
Three scoops — salted caramel, cookies ‘n’ cream and stracciatella per favore!
Yikes. I’ve been nudged. The two scoop option is just a decoy. Few are going to choose that option, because in all ways that matter, it is worse than the three scoop option. It’s got less flavour, it’s less ice-cream, it’s worse value for money. The three-scooper seems like an absolute steal by comparison.
Studies have demonstrated this decoy effect in action. It’s certainly messed with me before, big time.
In a similar vein, there’s the Ben Franklin effect. I wonder if you’ve heard of this one before? The Ben Franklin effect says that performing favours for someone makes you view them more positively, than if you had received a favour from them.
Yeah… strange, right?
Turning this around—you could get someone to do a small, hard-to-refuse favour for you, and thereby boost their opinion of you… This definitely seems like something that can be…ahem.. exploited. Indeed, the effect is named after the famous American, Benjamin Franklin, who supposedly used this trick to win over a hostile legislator.
That being said, the evidence for the Ben Franklin effect is mixed. Several studies, including this one have demonstrated the effect, but there is still some confusion about exactly how it works.
I wonder if this effect explains why empaths often seem to end up stuck in unhealthy relationships with narcissistic individuals?
Now before I sign off, I’ll leave you with one final prospect: it’s the rhyme-as-reason effect. By spinning a little ditty, your claim seems a little less shitty. Through the power of rhyme, lies trick people just fine.
Ugh that was genuinely terrible. I think you get the idea though :)
-Marc
