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…
One of the general underlying trends for the last few chapters has been about taking action (or the lack of it). This problem is confounded because often we don’t realise this is what we need to do, or what it is we have to do. There’s another bias that needs to be discussed with this…