1, survivor bias

20 18 There is an essay topic in the national college entrance examination: During World War II, in order to strengthen the protection of fighter planes, the British and American military investigated the distribution of bullet marks on surviving planes after the war and decided to strengthen them in places with many bullet marks. However, the statistician Ward believes that more attention should be paid to the parts with less bullet marks, because the fighters that were hit hard in these parts have crashed, and it turns out that Ward is right.

The theory of "survivor bias" shows that some "truths" we see are deliberately left behind after screening. These planes are deadly where there are few bullet marks, because they are rarely hit. Once hit, they have collapsed and there is no way to stand up and refute. Some people who have smoked all their lives live to be 99 years old and say, "You see, I smoke for a long time, and smoking is not harmful to my health, but beneficial." Because those who smoke but die young, there is no way to stand up and refute.

Survivor bias is a common logical fallacy, which makes us ignore the key information that has been filtered out. Survivor bias tells us that what you see is actually what you want to see.

"2. Egoism in attribution bias"

Your family is slowly destroying you; The thoughts of the poor are slowly destroying you; Your bad mood is slowly destroying you ... blaming everything on the outside world, showing your ability to protect your self-worth. When individuals participate in something, in order to maintain our self-esteem, we generally tend to attribute success internally to ourselves and to our own abilities.

For the reasons of failure, such as unhealthy, procrastination, three-minute fever, communication conflict, etc., we generally tend to attribute it to external factors rather than self-pity. Egoism in attribution bias is different from external attribution. Egoistic attribution bias means that half the success is your own credit; If you fail, throw the pot to someone else.

When there is a contradiction between boyfriend and girlfriend, they will think that the other party is looking for trouble and "doing"; I failed in the exam because the examination room was too noisy, the questions were too difficult and the papers were too strict. I did well in the exam because I was smart. It is only because some pig teammates always think that all bad things are bad things of others, but they can't see their own imperfections.

"3. Actor-observer bias"

When we are observers (spectators), it is easy to attribute other people's behavior (behavior generator) to his personality traits; When we are actors, it is easy to attribute our actions to situational factors.

When observing other people's behavior, they tend to blame other people's personality and ignore the influence of situational factors. When you observe yourself, you are influenced by the environment. Sometimes we drive very fast. At this time, we have our own situational reasons, which may be anxious and want to go to the hospital. But when we see someone racing on the road, we will say that the driver is an idiot.

When you take your partner home from work and see him lying on the sofa, you may think he is too lazy to be like a pig; If you lie on the sofa alone, you may feel tired.

"4. Sunk cost effect"

When people decide whether to do something, they should not only see whether it is good for them, but also whether they have invested in it in the past.

We call these used and unrecoverable expenses, such as time, money and energy, sunk costs. Like gambling. Even if they have lost money, gamblers who are blindly optimistic about their "record" always think that they have won more than they have lost. This is because people who gamble often have cognitive biases. They always remember the situation of winning money, but ignore the situation of losing money more.

People want to recover the sunk cost that has happened but cannot be recovered, and make many irrational behaviors. At the moment when gambling is not completely over, this cognitive deviation of "almost winning" makes gamblers feel that they have not lost yet and have a chance to win back the money they lost before.

"5. Backward vision deviation"

The deviation of looking back is interpreted as "Monday morning quarterback" in chess terminology. We may have met such a person. After watching the game, they began to sigh: "I knew he would advance"; When you make money by buying stocks, you say, "I knew X shares were a bull market …".

It is much easier to analyze afterwards than to predict beforehand. Their analysis of "hindsight" is only biased in memory, and the bias is not that people intentionally let others know that their evaluation is more appropriate. Even if individuals are allowed to express their initial feelings in the form of individual cases without being in front of others, this phenomenon will also occur. It is a kind of true memory distortion, which shows that individuals tend to think that their judgments are correct involuntarily in social perception.