The Smug Baldy Speaks

I drone on and on sometimes about how important critical thinking skills are, so I thought that I’d try something new this time around. Let’s take a look at some common mistakes people make in their thinking, and you decide if I’m holding a mirror up to you.

1. When you fail at something, do you blame the same person that you credit when you succeed?

It’s common for most of us to take personal credit for our success, but look for someone else to blame when we fail. By only taking responsibility for our success, we tend to feel better about ourselves. The cost of this self-serving bias, however, is that we can start to believe the myth we’re creating about ourselves. Taken to extremes, some people self-handicap by going out of their way to promote external factors that can lead to their own failures in an effort to avoid taking personal responsibility.

2. Do you think events like school shootings or terrorist attacks are fairly common?

Upsetting events like attacks at schools or overseas are actually very rare, but when they do occur, they can become more accessible in your memory, making it easier for us to misjudge how often or likely such events are to recur. This is known as the “availability heuristic”, and it’s a common source of biased or distorted judgement. One way out of this trap is to consider the influence of information sources on your actions and decisions. Are you acting based on information you recently received? If so – consider the source and how reliable it is before you proceed.

3. Do you lean on your stereotypes too heavily?

Stereotyping is pretty common since everyone uses stereotyping to some degree. Stereotypes are a sort of mental shorthand where we attribute the features or characteristics of a class to individuals we see as class members. For example, Pit Bull terriers are stereotyped as aggressive dogs, and if someone comes across my pit bull, they may conclude that he’s aggressive before getting to know him better.

Sometimes stereotypes are useful. For example, relying on a stereotype for aggressive animals might keep us from inadvertently hugging grizzly bears. Relying on stereotypes to make decisions about specific people, however, can be particularly harmful. Remember that stereotypes are there to help us think more efficiently. Sometime, however, you have to think a lot (which can be inefficient) – and in those cases, your stereotypes won’t help.

4. You knew that Obama would win the election, and the Steelers would win the Superbowl.

No you didn’t.

Neither of these instances were a sure bet, and you could argue that at least one was improbable. So why do you think you knew? Because you learned the outcome afterwards, and now you’re misjudging how probable these events really were before hand. This is known as hindsight bias, and it tricks us into the belief that we have some special knowledge of future events. In fact, we don’t – we have regular knowledge of past events.