psychological biases — 1 fairly sure investigation

psychological biases, as a phrase spoken out loud, suggests a tidy shelf of nicely labelled glass jars in a clean room. mine, in actual daily practice, look more like the kitchen drawer where the rubber bands and the takeout menus mate quietly in the dark. i’m fairly sure they reproduce in there.

i’m at the desk on the third floor. carla is two floors up at a working session about the working sessions. dave called twice while i was away from the laptop and left no message, which is, in dave terms, a full chapter. i have, generously, the rest of the morning before anyone notices i’m typing in a window that is not the window i am paid to be typing in.

so the plan, before the kettle in the breakroom finishes whatever it does, is to look at psychological biases as a category and admit, on the page, that they are not a tidy taxonomy in my head — they’re a household of related troubles, each one a cousin of the last, all sleeping on the same couch. the longer cluster pillar on confirmation bias handles the granddaddy of the family. this post is about the family, plural, in one investigation.

desk, half a coffee, the AC giving up. carla’s meeting is the kind that produces a deck nobody reads. dave will call again. i can feel it on the phone, the way you can feel weather.

psychological biases, brief

here’s the brief, in plain language, before any of the academic sounding ones — and i won’t use any of the academic sounding ones, because the manual they reference on the shows i watch is, near as i can tell, a doorstop with footnotes. psychological biases are the small private tilts of the brain. anchoring. halo. confirmation. availability. recency. the whole cousin tree. they share a last name and a thanksgiving table.

each one is, on its own, a perfectly defensible little shortcut. the brain rounded down, the brain rounded up, the brain pattern-matched a face it half-remembered from a thursday. taken individually, you could write each one off as a quirk. taken as a family, what you have is a household — loud, overlapping, eating each other’s snacks — that runs your day for you while you assume, sweetly, that you are running it yourself.

the polite way to put it: psychological biases are how the brain keeps the lights on without paying the bill. that is what i would put in the brochure. there is no brochure. there is, instead, this post, and a coffee that is becoming, structurally, a beverage.

dave’s call as evidence

dave called at 2:23pm. i did not pick up. dave called again at 9:51am. i did not pick up. by the third tab i opened — “is this a normal amount of dave”, in quotes, as a search query, which is itself a small psychological bias because i was looking for a website to tell me i was correct in not answering — i had built, in less than four minutes, a complete personal narrative in which dave was being unreasonable and i was being thoughtful. i held this narrative tight as a wallet.

then the fourth tab informed me, by way of a sticky note in my own handwriting taped to the monitor, that i still owe dave $300 and that he probably wants to discuss the timeline. the narrative cracked. the narrative did not break. it cracked, then it patched itself, immediately, into a new narrative in which i was being thoughtful and dave was being slightly demanding. that is a different example of psychological biases at work, lightly, in real time, on a wednesday.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a magazine the doctor’s office subscribes to, where researchers showed that the brain rewrites the story of a small confrontation roughly nine times in the first hour. nine. i did not read the study. i agreed with it the moment i imagined it.

carla’s pass-by as evidence

carla came down from the third floor briefly to grab a charger. she did not stop at the desk. she did not look at the desk. she did, however, glance at the desk, for what i timed as one and a half seconds, as she walked past on her way back to the elevator.

i constructed, from those one and a half seconds, three complete theories. (theory one: she saw the second window and she’ll mention it on friday. theory two: she saw nothing, she was thinking about the deck. theory three: she saw both windows and she’s already filed it for later because that’s how carla operates.) all three theories use the same one and a half seconds of evidence and arrive at incompatible conclusions. i hold all three. i hold them the way a man holds three grocery bags he refuses to put down because the elevator is “right there.”

this is, in textbook terms i won’t quote, the species of psychological biases that confirmation bias rents the front room for. the brain takes a sliver of input and writes a director’s commentary. then i pick the commentary that flatters me, archive the other two, and within forty minutes i remember only the flattering one as if it were the footage. the seventh microwave died in a similar way, by the way, but that is a tangent. the universe declined to comment on the microwave. i will not press it.

productivity bro tweeted his version

productivity bro tweeted, this week, a list titled “the 7 psychological biases that are stealing your dopamine”. he did not link a source. he did not need to. the bullet points were in a font that suggests certainty. one of them said “sunk cost — drop projects faster.” one of them said “halo effect — interview ugly people.” one of them, i swear, was an essential oil.

productivity bro is, himself, a walking exhibit of psychological biases. he sees the world as a deck. every problem is a slide. every slide has three bullets. every third bullet is a pivot. he has converted his entire brain into a presentation he is delivering to a future board that does not exist. i admire it. i resent it. i resent it more on tuesdays. i envy the calorie efficiency of being that wrong with that much confidence — there’s a man whose brain is on a low-information diet and thriving.

here’s the hot take, in the proper sense of the term: every meeting could be a 3-line email. and the reason every meeting could be a 3-line email is, fundamentally, the same reason productivity bro is wrong with such conviction. the meeting, like the tweet, is not gathering evidence. the meeting is gathering an audience for a position the loudest person in the room held before walking in. the slides are decor. the deliberation is theatre. psychological biases — confirmation, halo, anchoring — are the lighting, the backdrop, and the playbill. the meeting is the play.

and on the topic of certainty without evidence, i’ll cite a movie i’ve watched four times. the big short is two hours of clever men telling each other that the rest of the room is biased and them, specifically, is not. the men were correct, this one time. that does not make the method good. that makes the method lucky. luck is the psychological bias we like the most.

the 2 am notebook entry agrees

at 2 am on a recent monday-into-wednesday, i woke up and wrote, on a notebook i keep on the floor next to the bed, the following sentence: “all of my opinions are also moods.” i have looked at this sentence in the bright light of 9am several times since. it is, embarrassingly, correct. it is also exactly the kind of sentence the 2 am brain produces when the daytime brain is finally off the clock and unable to rephrase it into something more flattering.

this is the difference between psychological biases as i experience them and psychological biases as i’d describe them in a meeting. in a meeting, i’d say something like “yes, we should account for cognitive distortions in our framing.” at 2 am, alone, in a room with a notebook, i wrote: my opinions are moods. the 2 am version is the truer one. the meeting version is the version with the haircut.

i have, over the years, accumulated a stack of these 2 am notebook entries. some of them are insulting to me. some of them are insulting to people i know. one of them is insulting to 47 tabs i had open at the time, including a tab titled “is this a hobby or a personality” which i am, even now, not prepared to close.

verdict, the bias is psychological because i am

i went to the corner after work last week and asked mike about it directly. mike was on his second. the tv above the bar was muted, which is mike’s preferred configuration for the tv above the bar. i said, “mike. what do you do about psychological biases.” mike, who does not look up when he answers, said: “i don’t have any. i have preferences. and a system.”

i asked him to elaborate. mike, as a rule, does not elaborate. but on this particular thursday, mike said: “a bias is when you don’t know you’re doing it. a preference is when you know and you do it anyway. i know. i do it anyway. that’s not a bias. that’s character.” mike has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. the system is, by mike’s own description, “ongoing.” mike, on the topic of cognitive science, has nevertheless somehow nailed it from a stool.

so the verdict: psychological biases are real, they are plural, they are a household. they are not, in my honest experience, things you defeat. they are things you live with, the way you live with the upstairs neighbor. you learn the footsteps. you learn the patterns. you stop pretending the building is silent. and on the rare morning when the family is quiet, when the household is briefly out, you do whatever clear thinking you can manage in the gap, before they get back from the store.

dave called a third time. i let it go. carla came back from the third floor with a different charger. the chart i thought i was building has, over the course of typing this, become a list of cousins. the cousins are fine. the cousins are family.