Bias and Babas
Sometime around the end of March this year, when the whole world was starting to feel the wrath of the pandemic, a video of a bunch of fortune-tellers and astrologers making a prediction for the year 2020 for a tv program on a new years eve was making rounds in Whatsapp. Here is it.
For those who don’t understand the language, here is a short transcript of what it conveys: The year 2020 will be very prosperous and huge. People will rejoice a lot. There won’t be any big calamity or natural disaster and all the health problems will slowly go away. This is ironic at so many levels. Even if you argue this is for one particular raashi or nakshatra or whatever, given the magnitude of events that have taken place and the number of people who have got affected, I am pretty sure definitely many people belonging to that Raasi or Nakshatra also would have got affected in one way or the other. I am amazed by how someone who makes a living out of fortune-telling has got things so horribly wrong. But this did not stop anyone from making predictions. There is a boy prodigy who predicted the pandemic will end by May 29th. There were a bunch of people who predicted the pandemic will end after the solar eclipse which fell on June 21st. Every time the virus kept beating the predictions. After all, they don’t follow the laws of astrology. Fortune telling, astrology, tarot reading, parrot astrology, palm reading and so many other such stuff have found their way into many different cultures and religions around the world. This blog will be a short account of some of the proven cognitive bias on which this field thrives upon. I don’t have any data scraped from any astrological website, this blog will be a bunch of anecdotes based on personal experiences, many of it which you also can relate to. In my defence, they (Fortune Tellers) don’t have any data either.
The event of meeting a fortune teller is preceded and followed by a bunch of events and actions. Have sketched out the sequence of events surrounding the event of you or me meeting a fortune teller.
The beauty of this is, each event or action is fuelled and supported by a set of cognitive biases. Some cognitive biases are responsible for more than one action. Have tried to map the actions with the supporting cognitive bias. By no means, this is an exhaustive list but it captures the essence of what this blog tries to convey.
Level 1: Suggestion From Friend / Family / Social Group
Currently, you are undergoing a miserable phase in life - you are not able to land a job, you are finding difficulty in finding a soulmate or your health is miserable. You have tried a bunch of things and you are unable to turn around the misfortune. You need not even tell this to anyone, people who are keeping track of your life will come up with suggestions and advice. The suggestions will have a story that goes like this: Themselves or someone close they know would have gone through a similar miserable phase in life. Then they went and met Baba A, he gave some suggestion. After doing it immediately in the following weeks they were able to reverse the fortune and lived happily ever after types. Such a neatly narrated tale leaving out all the details which is an example of strong Story Bias resonates so well with us and gets registered in our mind. Here there is also Survivorship Bias at play as the one who recommends belongs to the cohort of visiting Baba A and got his problems resolved. The other cohort who visited Baba A and did not get his problems resolved mostly won’t go advising against Baba A. They simply fall out or start following some other Baba B. LinkedIn is peppered with Survivorship Bias stories of “I did this and it lead to success”. Next time when you spot one, ask yourself if everyone follows the same path. Will it still lead to success? Given that there is also social proof of this behaviour of meeting a fortune teller, you feel that you are behaving correctly when you act the same as other people.
Level 2: Visiting the Fortune Teller
You decide to visit the fortune-teller. You succumb to the Fallacy of the Single cause thinking all your current misery is due to the fact that some planets were not in proper alignment over the lat long co-ordinates in the place where you were born during the time when you were born. Makes full sense. Single Cause fallacy or oversimplification bias is a fallacy of questionable bias that occurs when it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of jointly sufficient causes. Also, there is Action Bias, which pushes you to do something about your current situation even if it is just to visit a fortune teller. Action bias pushes us to act in order to feel good, irrespective of whether the action is the right one.
Level 3: Fortune Teller plays tricks
He/She asks a few details about you and gives out few predictions and passes few judgements about your personality which includes flattering statements like how kind-hearted you are, how individualistic you are and how ppl envy you for how good you are etc. These are general statements that apply to most of the population after all who don't think of themselves as individualistic or kind-hearted. A classic example of the Forer Effect. And for you to overcome your miseries he won’t tell you to go and try working hard or be patient because working hard and waiting with uncertainty is a difficult thing to do and if that is the only solution you won’t come back to him again. So he blows up the single cause fallacy by statements such as your current situation is like this because you did something bad in your previous birth or because of misalignment of planets. There is also this effect of Déformation Professionnelle which makes him tell such statements. After all, if a hammer is the only tool in your toolbox every problem will look like a nail. He also propels your action bias by asking you to visit a faraway shrine a few times or follow something like fasting every Tuesday or Thursday. He plays a clever trick by asking you to continue doing this for a few months and assure you that your condition will improve over this period of time. He also does very broad predictions like you will get a job, your health will improve. And if everything acts according to what your planets say, you should find your match soon. He won’t delve into the specifics of what sort of job, from where you will find your soulmate etc. This is roughly an equivalent of you making a prediction that it will rain in your city. You don’t say when but it will rain.
Level 4: Back to Life
You take in all the suggestions and predictions in your mind and start living your life with much hope following the things he recommended out of fear of regret. Due to the Regression towards the mean effect your health improves, or after failing at 5 continuous job interviews ( You usually get after giving 3 interview on average, the last 2 jobs you got it in your first attempt) you crack the 6th one in the given time period. Since you overturned your fortune you start feeling that you have control over your life. This is nothing but the Illusion of control which is is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. And you now develop an Association bias of associating the fortune teller to your well being and start visiting him again and again and get sucked into the feedback loop. You also join the bandwagon of the group which follows this Baba A and start giving out recommendations to other misfortunate family members and friends with the new story you experienced without acknowledging that you yourself have fallen a victim to Survivorship bias.
Even if you have not turned around the misfortune as the fortune teller said, since you have spent so much time and effort following what he said, the sunk cost fallacy doesn’t allow you to abandon all the efforts that you have put in. So in order to understand why you haven’t overturned your fortune, you visit the fortune-teller again. While reasoning the fortune-teller gets help from Self-serving bias and manages to convince you that it was not his mistake that your misfortune continues. According to Self-serving bias if something works out, its purely because of his prediction powers. If not, your planets are the culprits.
He now asks you to follow even more rigorous rituals and visit even more shrines for an even longer period of time. Basically asking you to do more sinks (More Sunk cost fallacy) and buys more time for the regression to mean effect to kick in.
Plus there is the mother of all biases, Confirmation Bias which lets you see and hear things only which you want to see or hear, so you stay confined to your belief in the fortune teller.
Okay, I get it. Now what?
Now I think you can get why it is so difficult to get out of this loop with so many biases at play. Even if you manage to get out of this loop there will always be a social group recommending an alternative way of taming luck, which gets you into another feedback loop of the same nature but different jargons.
We all have our own superstitions, beliefs and built-in biases. It is so hard to fend them off totally but, being aware of it helps in situations where people try to take advantages of our biases. And now if I brag that every time in my life when I visited a fortune teller, I always knew that he was taking advantage of my beliefs and biases that would be nothing but a Hindsight Bias.
