The other week, scratch that, month, my flat mate, Aaron caught me in some specific cognitive biases that I realized (after more reflection) was very much baked into the thought processes of my family system.
The family systems theory is a theory introduced by Dr. Murray Bowen that suggests that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family, as the family is an emotional unit.
My memory is pretty shitty but the conversation sort of went like this,
“But what if I can’t do X and therefore I can’t get anything from the effort? Shouldn’t I just not try to do anything about it?”
“Em, there are like no bad sides to doing X, you can’t let the fear of the potential pros or cons (none of which you’ve mapped out yet) stop you from even doing anything — that’s just fear”
I stood there by the trashcan, pretty frozen, realizing he was right — I was letting very hypothetical thoughts, stop me from doing real things I actually wanted to do.
It took a few of the following weeks (when I was actually able to visit my family) for me to really map how certain sorts of thoughts or expressions may often hold us back from acting on the things that we do have control over. Although that’s not what this essay is about, it’s still a good reminder.
The cognitive bias I was echoing in my unconscious projection of fear of taking action is called the ambiguity effect which falls under a category of biases tagged as “Prospect Theory”.
This is where, we tend to avoid options that we consider to be ambiguous or to be missing information. We dislike uncertainty and are therefore more inclined to select an option for which the probability of achieving a certain favorable outcome is known.
Since some of my family seemed to lack the kind of information that would give them confidence, they therefore avoided many different kinds of risks, waiting for a long time before investing in anything remotely close to their dreams (for example a beach house), saving money, and avoiding personal or social risks, simply because they lacked information on what the upsides could be.
From a systems perspective, it's very possible that many cognitive biases might be transmitted unconsciously between members of the same family or even the same friend group that we wouldn’t discover unless we happened to be doing a lot of deep reflecting and questioning and even asking for feedback.
I started to see how voicing my own thoughts and fears to my room mate — were echos of the types of beliefs I witness my family having amongst themselves, but ones which I had yet to identify as flaws in my own thinking. Which brings us to another moment where I could recognize my own cognitive bias: Empathy gap — The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others. While I tended to over analyze my own family without looking at myself first, but good to balance out the overall “what do I think is actually the problem here?” Was it me, was it them, or was it neither or both/all of us that struggle with letting ourselves do things we really want to do because of fear?
Some things (like long term goals) require a ton of planning which is quite hard to do when you are rooted in cognitive biases that hinder your ability to see the benefits of planning or restructuring your thought process to evaluate what you might want to be doing. Positioning questions of “what are my own biases or blindspots in my awareness?” in the context of energy — allows for more reflection on the direction of our limited resources such as attention, time, or money.
“Youth is wasted on the young. It means that young people encounter all sorts of new situations and predicaments in life without the benefit of having learned life's lessons.”
I mean isn’t this just jealous boomer energy?
The abundance of both knowledge and wisdom on the internet makes this quote less and less true — there is the possibility to learn more of life lessons, both faster and sooner than the generations ahead of us once did — simply because of the time available to spend 1. getting into and 2. filtering for the wealth of information on the internet that might bring us closer to what we dream of.
Although we still take time to gain our own first hand personal experience, if we can get better at learning from the perspective of, “let’s try to learn something that speaks to us from others who have already been through things” we can potentially to choose our own versions of slightly better mistakes, thus my hope is in avoiding my parent’s mistake of “40 years of much too much stress” given the things I know now that I could do to set myself up to succeed, in the areas I value and think are important (also very subjective and a little hard to optimize for perfectly. When doing a mental reorg or a habit reorg, I think don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. It makes me think of this graph (which I could elaborate on more later).
I think the earlier we get to understanding our own biases, either working with them (leaning in approach), eliminating/smoothing over some with the help of others, the better we can self inform + refine + act on what we think is possible beyond the traditional trajectory of how things might go.
When I thought about it more in the context of my family, I felt as though that realized I shouldn’t let myself hold myself back, if I could continue to push myself to be aware of this kind of thinking and even do more research on other kinds of biases.
Other biases I seem to run into over and over again for documentation’s sake:
Utility / Action
Functional fixedness (an anchoring bias) — Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
Law of the instrument (an anchoring bias) — An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Hard-Easy Effect — The tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks
Temporal-ish
Duration neglect — The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value
End-of-history illusion — The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.
Projection bias — The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices
Declinism — The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.
Hyperbolic discounting (Extension neglect) — Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning. Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.'
Proximity / What’s Near Us
Clustering Illusion — The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns)
Mere exposure effect (Familiarity principle) — The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them
Availability Heuristic (availability) — The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
Attentional Bias (availability) — The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
Identity (self vs. others + things outside of us)
Curse of Knowledge — When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.
Distinction bias — (framing) The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
All in all, my direction for action from this reflection for myself that I know I won’t regret:
go be active, get the body moving
continue to help myself change your mind by becoming more self aware and reflecting self discovery/development back and forth (improving feedback mechanisms)
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Thanks for reading!
After finishing this I found Lawrence’s More to That post on a similar topic, if you’d like more context (and not the ultra personal self narrative style that I write in, I suggest you check it out)!