The mines in your mind - 1

We all believe that we are in complete control of our decisions and thoughts. In reality we are not in complete control; something causes the bias, mental shortcuts, thinking errors and other mental phenomena that ensure we are not in complete control. Most people tend to not even notice these phenomena and go through life completely oblivious to their existence. These phenomena appear to be almost hard wired into everyone’s psyche. Understanding them will probably help one make better decisions in the future. 

The most common thinking mine is cognitive dissonance. Easy to understand and explain. It occurs when one replaces one belief with another which is in complete conflict with the first belief. It generally happens as a reaction to some external stimuli. The story of the fox and the grapes is a great example . The fox gives up and chooses to make a change to his belief. Another great example that can be seen in the corporate world happens during appraisal cycles. Folks tend to accept the hike or the lack of it or the promotion or lack of it by rationalising and constructing a belief that is in conflict with the belief held at the start of the cycle. Rationalising and constructing a new belief after an event is something all of us do. We do it because of mental stress, anxiety and the feeling of discomfort. Once a threshold is breached it’s easier for us to creat the new belief as it removes the stress, discomfort and anxiety almost instantly. If one notices two beliefs in complete conflict with each other we should stop and try and understand the reason why the conflict has risen. 

We generally don’t pay enough attention to words people use in speech or in writing. There is a phenomenon that is exploited by the best marketing geniuses and the best salespeople. Let me explain how this phenomenon works. Imagine if you will two random questions or statements about a particular subject e.g statement a - this suv is worth more than xx. And statement b - the average suv cost is yy. These two simple statements have the effect of creating pseudo facts in your mind. These pseudo facts then become anchors for any further discussion on the subject in this case the price of a suv and a savvy marketing or sales person would be able to get you to agree to a price that is not the actual price because you feel it’s a good deal. One needs to change the pseudo facts to hard facts if one wants to avoid this mine. 

We all feel that we are under constant watch. Not the big brother kind but rather we feel that people are judging us every moment of every day. This causes anxiety. We then tend to behave in a manner that we believe others would appreciate to compensate the anxiety. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one has the time to be that judgemental in real life. Being judgemental on the internet is a different story. This is known as the spotlight and one would be far happier if one realised that one is not under judgement by others at all moments of each day. 

There are more mines to be written about. 

C