[Vol. 2 Issue #48]

Saturday

A special newsletter today, stories that stirred the soul and scratched the itch. We think we are better (or worse) than we really are. A TED Talk walks through the cognitive bias we all live in. Seth Godin follows with the clarification of a problem vs. a situation, and a poet born 140 years ago reminds us of a great marriage, one that involves two people who are good together and still have a sense of self.

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Spotlight

Understanding Bias

In a TED Talk by Robin Kramer, the Dunning Kruger Effect is put through a bunch of additional research to determine the accuracy of the original thesis. According to Kramer, science may suggest that additional nuance is needed to determine a cognitive bias. The Dunning-Kruger effect is our tendency to overestimate our abilities, but our braggadocious nature might seem everywhere when it isn't.

Relevance

It’s not your spouse or boyfriend who refuses to ask for directions – cognitive bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect direct everything from a passport ID checking process to test-taking protocols. The good news is we have a lot of curious science, science-hungry people who want to prove when a theory may have run its course. How many of these biases do you encounter:

Here are some of the most common cognitive biases:

Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.
Anchoring Bias: The common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions.
Hindsight Bias: Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, this is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than before.
Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that is available to us. A person might think that plane crashes are more common than they are after seeing one in the news.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: A cognitive bias wherein people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability, and those with high ability underestimate their competence.
Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to attribute positive events to one's own character but attribute negative events to external factors.
Groupthink: The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.
Overconfidence Bias: Someone's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy, especially when confidence is relatively high.
Status Quo Bias: The preference to keep things the same by doing nothing or sticking with a previous decision.
Negativity Bias: The notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g., unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things.

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Two Hearts

A poet from Lebanon, born in the 1800s, wrote a beautiful poem about marriage. Most poems and writings about marriage move two souls into one being. In Kahlil Gibran’s poem, written in 1923, he focuses on the love of marriage, but not at the expense of either person. In Gibran's words

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Problems Vs. Situations

Do you know the difference between a problem and a situation? Seth Godin dives into this question and tells us that a problem has a solution, whereas a situation is a thing we need to live with. In his succinct way, Godin gives us a good outline for identifying the difference, and once we determine we have a problem, he provides advice on where to look for solutions.