Look in the mirror and be honest about what you see

The real art of thinking clearly doesn’t entail adopting someone else’s wisdom. It means resolving the clashes between your own values and daily behavior. The human brain is an intricate thing, bursting with decision-making capabilities that you can’t begin to totally understand. But it’s full of errors, too.

Presented in 99 parts and covering 99 imperfections of human existence, the international bestseller The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli is a straightforward and accessible look at biases, knowledge, probabilities, fallacies, effects, illusions, syndromes, and anomalies that plague people’s lives and society in general.  It tackles topics like facing up to your “loss aversion,” or your fright of losses more than your desire for gains, your predisposition to underestimate the danger of extreme events,  “obedience” experiments, which revealed participants’ dismal readiness to let authority figures weaken their own moral judgment, or a recount of the oft-cited marshmallow experiment, which concluded that children who can wait become more successful in life.

“The failure to think clearly, or what experts call a ‘cognitive error,’ is a systematic deviation from logic — from optimal, rational, reasonable thought and behavior. By ‘systematic,’ I mean that these are not just occasional errors in judgment but rather routine mistakes, barriers to logic we stumble over time and again repeating patterns through generations and through the centuries,” Dobelli explains. The book is not a how-to on attaining an error-free life; it acts as insurance against what the author calls “too much self-induced unhappiness.” Here are my 21 choices from Dobelli’s 99.

• Awareness of your “circle of competence” is key. If you have to make an important decision about something you’re not an expert on, take the time to think; if the decision is important and you are an expert, trust your intuition; if it’s not important, don’t waste your energy by thinking. Just go with your gut.

• A decision must never be judged purely by its result. This is especially true when randomness or “external factors” play a role. A bad result does not automatically indicate a bad decision and vice versa.

• The more you like someone, the more inclined you are to buy from or help that person. This is what’s called the “liking bias,” which is startlingly simple to understand and yet you continually fall prey to it. It means that you’ve fallen under the influence of the “endowment effect,” where you consider things to be more valuable the moment you own them. In other words, if you are selling something, you charge more for it than what you yourself would be willing to spend.

• Sharing what you know about the world with others is enriching. As you do it, you experience your own discoveries vicariously. It engages you in an educational exploration that brings your most joyful moments, whatever your role is in life. Entertainment, for example, has a valuable place in your life and for the world. Perhaps you wouldn’t replace an engaging novel with a business or trade magazine for bedtime reading. And when you try to care about what’s going on in the world, strive to find truly significant ways to expand your awareness and extend yourself.

• Falling prey to the sunk-cost fallacy can lead to more failure and unhappiness. This is your state of affairs when you stick with a horrible or expensive situation simply because you’ve invested so much time, energy or money in it. If you paid to watch a movie, and then find out it’s awful but you continue to sit in the theater, you are not only wasting the money spent on the ticket, but your time. Assess only the future costs and benefits of your decision, not the sunk costs, when deciding whether to continue or pull the plug on something. That way, you can quickly walk away from bad movies, bad relationships and bad investments.

• Being wary of “confirmation bias” is a sound decision. It makes you embrace information that coddles your existing beliefs, while screening out information that tests those beliefs. It is the mother of all misconceptions, and the tendency to interpret new information so that it becomes compatible with your existing theories, beliefs and convictions. Write down your beliefs, and then resolutely embark to discover information that defies your suppositions.

• Your self-serving bias causes an overestimation of your contributions. This happens whether you are a coworker, a roommate, a husband or a wife. In many instances, you tend to overrate your contributions, but in the same breath, you also tend to slack off the bigger your group gets. An engineer had several men pull individually on a rope and he measured their power. If two men pulled together, they invested 93 percent of the power they had used when pulling individually. When eight men pulled together, they used just 49 percent of their individual power. It’s okay to have people work together in teams, but leaders should figure out ways to measure each person’s individual contributions.

• Systematically overestimating your chances of success constitutes “survivorship bias.” Guard against it by frequently visiting and revisiting the graves of once-promising projects, investments and careers. It is a sad walk, but one that should clear your mind. 

• Getting caught up in the introspection illusion is dangerous. If you have reflected on an issue, it can cause you to believe that your views represent the truth. If you deem your views are the truth, you only have three reactions to people who don’t share those views: they are either ignorant of the facts, just plain stupid, or simply evil. To counter such an illusion, “Be all the more critical with yourself. Regard your own internal observations with the same skepticism as claims from some random person.”

• The fallacy of  “it’ll get worse before it gets better” should set alarm bells ringing. But beware: Situations do exist where things dip, and then improve. For example, a career change requires time and often incorporates loss of pay. The reorganization of business also takes time. But in all these cases, you can see relatively quickly if the measures are working. The milestones are clears and verifiable. Look to these rather than the heavens.

• Don’t cling to things. Consider your property something that the “universe” (whatever you believe this to be) has bestowed on you temporarily. Keep in mind that it can recoup this (or more) in the blink of an eye.

• You can’t fight it. Evil is more powerful and more plentiful than good. You are more sensitive to negative than to positive things. On the street, scary faces stand out more than smiling ones.  You remember bad behavior longer than good — except, of course, when it comes to yourself.

• It’s not what you say, but how you say it. Realize that whatever you communicate contains some element of framing, and that every fact — even if you hear it from trusted friend or read it in a reputable newspaper — is subject to this effect, too.

• If you have an enemy, give him information. Perform your best to get by with bare facts; it will help you make better decisions. Superfluous knowledge is worthless, whether you know it or not. As historian Daniel J. Boorstin puts it: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.” And next time you are confronted by a rival, consider killing him — not with kindness — but with reams of data and analysis.

• Whether you like it or not, you are a puppet of your emotions. You make complex decisions by consulting your feelings, not your thoughts. Against your best intentions, you substitute the question, “What do I think about this?” with “How do I feel about this?” So smile, your future is slave to your emotions.

• It’s never just a two-horse race.  If you have trouble making a decision, remember that the choices are broader than “no surgery” or “highly risky surgery.” Forget about the rock and the hard place, and open your eyes to other, superior alternatives.

• First and last impressions dominate. This means that the content sandwiched in between has only a weak influence. Try to avoid evaluations based on first impressions. They will deceive you, guaranteed, in one way or another. Try to assess all aspects impartially. It’s not easy, but there are ways around it. For example, if you’re interviewing, jot down a score every five minutes and calculate the average afterward. This way, you make sure that the “middle” counts just as much as hello and goodbye.

• Last chances make us panic. Let’s say you have long dreamed of owning a house. Land is becoming scarce. Only a handful of plots with sea views are left. Three remain, then two, and now just one. It’s your last chance! This thought racing through your head, you give in and buy the last plot at an exorbitant price. The fear of regret tricked you into thinking this was a onetime offer, when in reality, real estate with a lake view will always come on the market. The sale of stunning property isn’t going to stop anytime soon. “Last chances” make you panic-stricken, and the “fear of regret” can overwhelm even the most hardheaded dealmakers.

• Like all emotions, envy has its origins in our evolutionary past. You are the offspring of the envious. But in today’s world, envy is no longer vital. If your neighbor buys himself a Porsche, it doesn’t mean that he has taken anything from you. When you find yourself suffering pangs of envy, be reminded: “It’s okay to be envious — but only of the person you aspire to become.”

• Purge yourself of the “illusion of attention” every now and then. Confront all possible and seemingly impossible scenarios. What unexpected events might happen? What lurks beside and behind the burning issues? What is no one addressing? Pay attention to silences as much as you respond to noises. Check the periphery, not just the center. Think the unthinkable. Something unusual can be huge; we still may not see it. Being big and distinctive is not enough to be seen. The unusual and huge thing must be expected.

From here, you can start applying the lessons you learned almost instantly from Dobelli’s list. Surely they will be useful navigational tools in decision-making as you’re faced with overwhelming choices, too many resolutions and assessments, or plain overthinking. But before you take the plunge on anything, “look in the mirror — and be honest about what you see.”

* * *

E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating. The Art of Thinking Clearly is available at National Book Store.