Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement Why You Make Bad Decisions: Confirmation Bias and the 7 Sins of Lazy Thinking [Cognitive Biases #4]
Dec 5, 2025
Discover how cognitive biases shape our decision-making in surprising ways. Explore confirmation bias, the comfort of echo chambers, and the risk of neglecting important statistics. Learn to reframe unexpected events into manageable predictions and overcome decision paralysis with effective commitment strategies. Dive into intriguing examples, from everyday choices to historical disasters, while enhancing your long-term thinking. It's time to break free from mental shortcuts and choose clarity in your decision-making.
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Vivid Stories Skew Risk
- The availability heuristic makes vivid or recent examples overweight our judgments of frequency and risk.
- Sam Webster Harris shows this causes us to misjudge events like terrorism, tornadoes, and the lottery.
Visualize The Hidden Data
- Visualize the missing, non-sensational data you aren't shown to correct availability bias.
- Sam Webster Harris recommends deliberately imagining the millions of unreported cases or losers behind a single story.
We Misread Probabilities
- People systematically ignore statistical probabilities and prefer intuitive but incorrect options.
- Sam Webster Harris uses the jelly-bean example and big disasters to show how neglect of probability scales up.