We Fail More Than We Think
Steel Notes Magazine
February 2017
Alessia Bastianelli – Italy
Venice 01.28.2017
We Fail More Than We Think
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How many times do we buy items without being convinced , and we already know that we will regret it ? Or how many times do we believe more in our memories than to actual events ? Or yet , we make decisions not based on logic , but on our beliefs . These are only some of the most frequent errors of the mind . They happen almost daily . Being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thinking can make a big difference in avoiding them . Unfortunately , most of these occur unconsciously , so it will also take time and effort to avoid them — if you even want to . Let ’ s look at some . The first is confirmation bias . Often , if we agree with someone ’ s way of thinking , we are more inclined to become friends with this person . That is , we tend to surround ourselves with information that matches our beliefs . This makes sense and it means that consciously or unconsciously we ignore or reject anything that threatens our own point of view by surrounding ourselves with people and information that confirms what we already think . A very similar concept is frequency illusion . It occurs when we buy a new car and suddenly we see the same car all over the place or when we are on diet and suddenly we see tasty food everywhere . The difference between confirmation bias and frequency illusion is that , with the first , we proactively seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs , whereas with frequency
illusion our brains seek out information that ’ s related to us , but we believe there ’ s been an actual increase in the frequency of those .
A second type of common mistake is that we believe our memory more than the facts . For example , if we are asked to read a page of text and then are asked if there were more words in that page ending in “ ing ” or more words with the letter “ n ” as the penultimate letter in the word , the most frequent response it is that there are more words ending in “ ing .”
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