As an easy reference, here’s a checklist of antidotes covering every major bias and heuristic from the book.
Cognitive Biases and Heuristics
- To block System 1 errors, recognize the signs that you’re in trouble and ask System 2 for reinforcement.
- Observing errors in others is easier than in yourself. So ask others for review. In this way, organizations can be better than individuals at decision-making.
- To better regulate your behavior, make critical choices in times of low duress so that System 2 is not taxed.
- Order food in the morning, not when you’re tired after work or struggling to meet a deadline.
- Notice when you’re likely to be in times of high duress, and put off big decisions to later. Don’t make big decisions when nervous about others watching.
- In general, when estimating probability, begin with the baseline probability. Then adjust from this rate based on new data. Do NOT start with your independent guess of probability, since you ignore the data you don’t have.
- WYSIATI
- Force yourself to ask: “what evidence am I missing? What evidence would make me change my mind?”
- Ordering effect
- Before having a public discussion on a topic, elicit opinions from the group confidentially first. This avoids people from getting their first biased by the first speakers.
- Reversion to the mean
- Question whether high performers today are merely outliers who will revert to the mean.
- When looking at high and low performers, question what fundamental factors are actually correlated with performance. Then, based on these factors, predict which performers will continue and which will revert to the mean.
- Anchors
- In negotiations, when someone offers an outrageous anchor, don’t engage with an equally outrageous counteroffer. Instead, threaten to end the negotiation if that number is still on the table.
- If you’re given one extreme number to adjust from, repeat your reasoning with an extreme value from the other direction. Adjust from there, then average your final two results.
- Availability bias
- Force yourself to lower the weight on more available things. Especially be wary of things you see repeated often in news or advertising, and of things that strongly trigger extreme emotions.
- Be aware of “common sense” intuitions that seem true merely because it’s repeated often, like “searing meat seals in the juices.”
- Representativeness
- To avoid the “Tom W. librarian” problem, use Bayesian statistics. Start by predicting the base rates, using whatever factual data you have. Then consider how the new data should influence the base rates.
- Conjunction fallacy
- When hearing a complicated explanation that has too many convenient assumptions or vivid details (like an investment pitch for a business or an explanation for what caused a phenomenon), be aware that each additional assumption lowers the likelihood of it being true.
- Hindsight/Outcome Bias
- Keep a journal of your current beliefs and what you estimate the outcomes to be. In the future, once the outcomes are known, reflect on your beliefs at the time to see how accurate you were.
- Reward people based on the decisions they make at the time with the information they had, before the outcomes come out. Don’t reward people who took outlandish risks but got lucky.
- Using algorithms over intuition
- Standardize the hiring interview. Make a list of traits important for success in the role. Then create direct questions to assess the trait, and a rubric. Score each person on all traits in the rubric. Finally, hire the person with the highest score, period.
- This can be generalized to any decision process.
- Planning fallacy
- Write a premortem. “Imagine that it’s a year from now. We implemented the plan. It was a disaster. Write a history of the disaster.”
- Invert the question.
- How can this project fail?
- Turn a loss into a gain and re-ask the question, and vice versa.
- Use formulas and checklists to avoid biases.
- Use biases to your advantage by overcoming your fears and problems
- When feeling a negative emotion, surround yourself with available info on the inverse positive emotion (for example, on ways you feel competent or a vision of your project’s success).
- Improve your mood by considering negative outcomes as costs rather than losses. For example, a failed project is the cost of learning the lesson, rather than a dead loss.
Prospect Theory
- Be aware of how much you value probabilities in the extremes. 1% appears far better than 0%, and 100% appears far better than 99%.
- Framing effects
- Invert the framing to a complementary view. Turn an increase in mortality into a decrease in survivability, and vice versa.
- Endowment effect
- Be wary of when you prize the status quo merely because it’s the status quo.
- Denominator neglect
- Reduce all decisions down to a single fungible metric, in the broadest account possible, to allow global calibration. For example, benefits to human life can be assessed in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years per $, so that repairing glaucoma can be compared to childhood cancers.
- Narrow framing
- Adopt risk policies: simple rules to follow in individual situations that give a better broad outcome.
- Deliberately consider the broad range of alternatives for scarce resources—time, labor, money. Be aggressive with defining the global set of opportunity costs.
Happiness
- Improving experienced happiness
- Focus your time on what you enjoy. Commute less.
- To get pleasure from an activity, you must notice that you’re doing it. Avoid passive leisure time in places like TV, and spend more time in active leisure time, like socializing and exercise.
- Focusing illusion
- To evaluate your life satisfaction, create a life rubric, where you list the factors and their weightings, then score each of the factors. This might make you happier and grateful for what you have, rather than focusing on single sore points that stick out.
- Reflect on your past experiences to inform future ones—how much did buying something in the past make you happier today? What activity are you really thankful to your past self for doing? Do more of what you appreciate your past self for having done.
- Cater to both your remembering self and your experiencing self.