cognitive bias examples — 1 investigation

examples of cognitive bias are, frankly, much easier to come up with than examples of plain cognitive clarity. i looked into both categories on the same afternoon. the first folder filled itself, alarmingly, in about an hour. the second contains, as of right now, a single receipt for parsley i never actually needed.

i opened a document titled “good calls, recent” and stared at the cursor for eleven minutes. then i opened a parallel document titled “bad calls, recent” and the keys started moving on their own. the screen filled, the scrollbar shrank, my coffee went cold, and the only thing that interrupted the cascade was a tweet that landed in the corner of my monitor like a small flare.

the tweet was a productivity bro. of course it was a productivity bro. he had thirteen thousand likes and a square avatar and a thread, which he announced with the words “5 cognitive bias examples that are KILLING your output.” the all-caps was load-bearing. i read the thread. then i read it again. then i wrote this from my desk while carla was upstairs at the q3 review on the third floor and the rest of the morning was, by my honest reckoning, my own.

writing this from the desk. carla is on the third floor for the q3 review, the muffin tray, and whatever blue slide deck has been retitled this quarter. i have, on a generous read, until 3:18pm.

before the productivity bro arrived, i had been re-reading my own piece on confirmation bias by someone who is allegedly always right, because the document titled “bad calls, recent” had, on closer inspection, a recurring structure. the structure was: i decided a thing, i sought one piece of evidence, i quit looking. that is, technically, the textbook. it is also, technically, why my kitchen contains an air fryer used once and a good knife used on cheese, badly. the textbook walks around in slippers in my apartment. that’s the joke. that’s also the post.

cognitive bias examples, brief

the productivity bro’s list of cognitive bias examples was, for honesty’s sake, terrible. his examples were: “anchoring at a salary negotiation”, “sunk cost on a startup pivot”, “availability heuristic in a board meeting”, “halo effect in vendor selection”, and “confirmation bias in OKR planning”. every single example was a meeting. every single example was a meeting that the productivity bro had clearly never been in, in a building he had clearly never entered, with a person who had clearly never said any of the words on his slide.

my examples are different. my examples happened to me, with witnesses, in places that have stools and aprons and one flickering bulb in the back. mondays are objectively better than fridays for collecting cognitive bias examples, because by friday everyone has the same bias and by monday the contrast is fresh. i’m fairly sure there is a study on this, possibly in a serious magazine, possibly written by a man with a beard who has also never been in a meeting.

so here is my list, gathered the slow way, by being a person near other persons. five examples. all of them cognitive bias examples. none of them about OKR planning. one of them with mike. mike is, as discussed, a load-bearing column.

the bar example, mike-tested

last wednesday at the corner, mike and i had an argument about whether the mute button on the tv had been broken for “weeks” or “months”. i said weeks. mike said months. mike was on his second. i was on my first and a half, which counts as a first if you measure honestly. neither of us had any evidence. we had, between us, zero records. zero photos. zero receipts. and yet we were both, in the moment, completely sure.

i argued weeks because i remembered a hockey game where the sound had still worked. mike argued months because he remembered a baseball game where it hadn’t. neither of us could date either game. neither of us tried. we just kept reaching back into the murk, picking up whatever floated, and presenting it as exhibit A. exhibit A in the bar is whatever you grabbed last.

this is, near as i can tell, the canonical case of availability bias, which is the tendency to weight whatever evidence comes to mind first as if it were the strongest evidence. mike has a system for taxes. mike has not filed since 2019. mike’s system, applied to the mute button, told him the breakage was old because his memory of the baseball game was vivid. my memory of the hockey game was equally vivid. we were both running mike’s system, which is to say, we were both wrong, in different colours.

the punchline is that the bartender, when asked, said the mute button had been working fine until that exact wednesday. it broke during our argument. neither of us had been right about when. we had been arguing about a state of affairs that did not exist until we summoned it. that’s cognitive bias examples in the wild — two men insisting on the past tense of a verb that hadn’t happened yet.

the supermarket example

i went to the supermarket on a sunday, which was the first error, and i went without a list, which was the second error, and i went hungry, which was the third error, and these three errors compounded into the fourth error, which was a forty-six-dollar receipt with no dinner on it.

i bought: three different mustards, a jar of capers, a bag of frozen edamame, two cans of artichoke hearts, a bottle of fish sauce, a packet of dried mushrooms, and a single avocado that was already, on close inspection, not okay. there was no protein. there was no carb. there was no plan. there was a man, in a fluorescent room, mistaking specificity for preparation.

this is, as far as i can tell, the cleanest example of the planning fallacy i can produce on demand. the planning fallacy is the species-wide habit of believing the version of the future where everything goes right and nothing takes time. i had, in the supermarket, an entire mental film of myself making a complicated sunday-evening dinner involving capers and dried mushrooms and an avocado. the film starred a calmer man than the one pushing the cart. the film had soft lighting. the film was, frankly, a lie. the actual sunday evening involved a microwave and a tortilla and a regret. the capers are, as of writing, still in the cupboard, observing.

i once had a conversation about this with stefan, briefly, before he moved teams. stefan said, with the exhausted patience of a man whose system has worked since 2018, that the only fix for the supermarket was a list, written before hunger, executed without deviation, and abandoned at the door. stefan went on to a beautiful mind levels of productivity, which is to say, he became unbearable at parties but his pantry was sane. i did not adopt the list. i adopted the lecture. i now lecture other people about the list, while i, personally, continue to buy three mustards.

the seventh microwave example, ongoing

i have killed seven microwaves. this is a fact about me. it is also a long-running case study in fundamental attribution error, which is the species-wide tendency to blame the situation when it’s about us and the character when it’s about other people. when other people break microwaves, they are reckless. when i break microwaves, the microwave is “poorly built” or the kitchen has “weird voltage” or the spoon was “shorter than it looked”.

the seventh microwave died in march. there was a fork involved. i’m not going to say more about that here. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. the laugh was, in itself, an example of cognitive bias examples: dave laughed because dave’s brain had already decided, on the strength of microwaves one through six, that microwave seven was going to be my fault. dave was correct. but he was correct on prior, not on evidence. dave had not seen the fork. dave had simply, with the calm of an actuary, computed that the fork existed somewhere in the story.

i keep a small note on my phone titled “microwave defenses, in case anybody asks”, which is, on a slow re-read, a curated exhibit of cognitive bias examples with me as the curator. every entry begins with a structural fact about the microwave or the kitchen. none of them say “i used a metal object”. the absence is the data. the absence is also, technically, the bias. you cannot find your own blind spot. you can only find, in retrospect, the shape of the missing entry. the shape of the missing entry, in my note, is fork-shaped. the shape is consistent across seven entries. the shape is, by my honest count, a confession.

the unopened mail pile example

there is, on the small table by my door, a pile. the pile has been there, in some form, since i moved into the apartment. the pile contains, near the top, the new mail. the pile contains, near the bottom, mail from a previous tenant who has not lived here since 2021. the pile is sorted, technically, by gravity. the pile is sorted, philosophically, by avoidance.

i triage the pile by colour. the white envelopes get a glance. the brown envelopes get a longer glance. the windowed envelopes from anyone official get a head-tilt and then go directly into the middle of the pile, where the laws of geology dictate they will be recovered, eventually, by a future archaeologist. this is ostrich effect, which is the formal term for “if i don’t open it, it isn’t a bill”. the formal term is generous. the formal term is also, in my case, a religion.

the example, for the list, is this: i once received the same letter three times from the same sender across a span of eleven months, opened none of them, and only realised it was the same letter when i finally opened the fourth, which contained a polite-but-tightening sentence about how the sender had now sent four of these. the bias was so complete that it had, in effect, generated its own correspondence. the letter was telling me about the letter. i was, technically, in a feedback loop with my own avoidance. that is a higher-order cognitive bias examples situation. that is the kind of thing they should put on a poster, in a building i would not enter.

this also connects, distantly, to a dynamic i wrote about for the idiot abroad piece on tourism, denial, and the airport bookstore — the same brain that ignores mail at home is the brain that, abroad, refuses to translate the menu. the abroad version is funnier. the home version is, alas, the rent. one idiot, two postcodes, same blind spot.

verdict, the examples kept walking up to me

so here is what the document titled “bad calls, recent” turned into, by the time the productivity bro had finished his fifth slide and i had finished my third coffee. it turned into cognitive bias examples as a way of life, not as an HR seminar. it turned into a list with a bar in it, a supermarket in it, an appliance in it, a pile in it, and a man in it who keeps writing about being wrong as if the writing were a defence and not, in fact, exhibit number six.

the productivity bro was selling the idea that you can list the biases, then beat them, then move on with a tighter calendar. the truth is messier. you can list the biases. you cannot beat them. you can, on a good morning, with coffee, before the meeting on the third floor starts, briefly notice one of them in operation and reduce its grip by maybe ten percent. that’s the whole skill. that’s the whole win. anybody who tells you they have “debiased their decision-making” is, with the calmest possible voice, telling you the bias is so deep they no longer detect it.

carla just walked past the desk on her way to a refill. tab swapped. she didn’t comment. tomorrow it’ll be the budget meeting and the same coffee and the same, slightly different document titled “bad calls, recent” with a new entry already half-written.