You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. Wayne Gretzky said that, the famous ice hockey player, and it’s one of my favourite quotes. Not only because it’s true, but because it gives us a perfect example of how omission bias affects us every single day. For some people, omission bias is…
By now I hope you accept that the majority of our automatic day to day decisions are affected by cognitive biases. In this lesson we’re going to discuss the effect that our perception of comfort and safety has on our lives, because here’s something most people don’t realise. Comfort and safety are not the same…
He still wanted the purple pills. He was adamant they worked far better than the cheaper, non-purple generic alternative. The pills were chemically identical in terms of the active drug, but the non-branded ones, he told me, just didn’t work at all. Most people are already aware of the phenomenon called the placebo effect. The…
How Substances (Legal and Otherwise) Keep You Stuck There’s a concept I call the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency that distorts our perception of the world. When this happens, we become vulnerable to harm, often without realising we’re at risk. Things like drugs and alcohol are the main culprits. You just need to witness the carnage in…
Why You Keep Taking the Same Road and Expecting a Different Destination I’d like to talk about stubbornness for a moment. Stubbornness can work for us or against us. I often see people disadvantaged by a stubborn tendency, people who carry on doing what they’ve always done yet possibly expecting a different result. I also…