cognitive biases in decision making — explained — 1 brief investigation
cognitive biases in decision making — explained — 1 brief investigation
cognitive biases in decision making is the polite phrase for the reason i bought the seventh microwave. carla has the longer phrase. she used it in the q3 review, which i was not invited to. the microwave is on the floor.
typing this from the desk on a wednesday, around 10:38am, while carla is upstairs in a budget training nobody asked her to lead. that gives me roughly forty minutes, give or take a stand-up i’m pretending not to see on the calendar. the chart on my screen is, apologetically, a chart. the seventh microwave is, less apologetically, on the kitchen floor at home, where i left it on tuesday night with the door open and the light still working. one out of two functions is, by my own internal grading curve, a passing grade.
so here we are. an investigation. lowercase. brief on purpose, because brief is what i can deliver while my favorite cognitive shortcut, the one where i am always right and the evidence catches up later, drives the bus.
cognitive biases in decision making, brief
here is the part where a serious magazine would put a graph. i’m fairly sure there is one, possibly in a magazine i used to read in waiting rooms. i don’t have it. i have, instead, a phone at 23% battery and a list i’ve been writing in the notes app between the chart and the chart’s prettier sibling.
the list, in the order i thought of them this morning, with no ranking and no adult supervision:
- the i-already-decided shortcut — i make the call in the elevator and spend the meeting collecting reasons. by the time i sit down, the decision has a memo, a deck, and one supportive nod from a person who wasn’t listening.
- the first-number-wins shortcut — somebody says twelve. now everything is a percentage of twelve. the original question was about how many tabs i should close. the answer is now eleven, because twelve felt aggressive.
- the recent-news shortcut — i watched a documentary about bread on sunday. for three days, every problem at work had a flour solution. carla did not appreciate this in the budget meeting.
- the everyone-agrees shortcut — three people nodded in a slack channel. i mistook that for consensus. it was, in retrospect, the same person on three devices.
- the sunk-cost shortcut — the third yoga mat. the one under the couch, possibly evolving. i will not throw it out, because i bought it, which according to me is a reason.
- the i-can-fix-it shortcut — see also: every appliance i have ever owned, including the seventh microwave, which i can absolutely not fix and have never fixed and will not fix on thursday either.
that is six. i think the polite number is seven, the way the polite number of microwaves is one, but here we are, and consistency is, itself, a shortcut.
the decisions i pretend to make
most of what i call decisions are receipts. i hand them in at the end of the day, slightly creased, and somebody — usually past me, around 9:14am, with coffee — has already signed them. the rest of the day is me notarizing.
thursday is a good example. tuesday i decided, formally, in the kitchen, to reheat pasta in a metal bowl using the microwave. the part of my brain that knows about metal in microwaves was, at that exact second, in another meeting. the part of my brain that wanted dinner faster filed an emergency override. the override was unanimous. the override was also wrong.
THE FORK. WAS. ON THE COUNTER. AGAIN.
i bring up the fork because the fork is, frankly, a cognitive bias with prongs. it has been on the counter every time. i have, every time, looked at it the way a person looks at a former friend at a wedding. acknowledged. unaddressed. that is not a decision. that is a small ceremony i hold on tuesdays.
the chatgpt-assisted decisions, briefly
some of the decisions are now outsourced. i have a tab open with chatgpt that i pretend is research. i type a question i already have an answer to and i wait for the algorithm to congratulate me. it does. it almost always does. it has, in this regard, become a very expensive yes.
i asked it, last week, whether it was reasonable to keep the seventh microwave on the kitchen floor “for a few days, while i think”. it said yes, in four supportive paragraphs, with bullet points. one of the bullets used the word thoughtful. that is when i knew. thoughtful is what a robot says when it’s politely suggesting you have lost the plot.
this is the trick of any assistant, mechanical or otherwise: it learns the shape of your wanting and it returns it to you with a nicer font. you ask, it answers, you call it research. carla calls it something less generous in the q3 review. carla is not wrong.
let me tell you something about the chair you sit in to make a hard call. it has opinions. it has a favorite outcome. it has, i am fairly sure based on a magazine i half-read, a small lobbying budget.
the chair would prefer you didn’t get up. the chair would prefer you confirmed what you already believe. the chair would prefer you treat the search bar as a mirror and the assistant as a witness. and the chair, because plants are silent landlords and chairs are louder, has been winning since 2019.
i’d like to say i fight it. i don’t. i sit. i type. i nod. i ratify. i call it strategy.
the subscription decisions, audited
last sunday, instead of doing what mom asked on the call, i did a subscription audit. this is, technically, a decision. it is also six smaller decisions in a trench coat, and four of them were made by a younger me with worse judgment and a free trial.
i counted thirteen recurring charges. eight i remembered. three i recognized after a small interview with my own bank app. two were a complete surprise — one for a meditation product i used for nine days in 2022, one for a magazine i’m pretty sure i intended to read in a waiting room someday. someday came. the magazine kept charging.
here’s the bias problem. i didn’t cancel any of them on sunday. i opened the audit. i made the spreadsheet. i closed the spreadsheet. i told myself i would handle it on monday, because monday is, scientifically and according to my own private rulings, when grown-ups handle things. monday i did not handle it. i opened the spreadsheet, agreed with it, closed it again, and added a tab.
that’s the seventh shortcut, if we’re counting, which we apparently are: the made-the-list-so-it’s-handled shortcut. the list is not the action. the list is the costume the action wears to the meeting it doesn’t attend.
the seventh microwave was a decision
the microwave on the kitchen floor is, technically, the consequence of a chain of small calls i made between 9:14am and 9:47am on tuesday. each one made sense at the time. that’s the dangerous bit — they didn’t feel like a chain. they felt like, you know, a friday.
call one: the metal bowl looked microwave-shaped. call two: the fork was already in the bowl, and removing it was, somehow, more work than not removing it. call three: thirty seconds is shorter than ninety, so thirty would be safer. call four: the small dragon noise was, possibly, a feature. call five: by the time the sparks happened, i was, frankly, a passenger.
this is what cognitive biases in decision making actually look like in the wild. not a graph. not a paper. a tuesday. a fork. a number going up. a person, me, narrating it as common sense in real time, the same way a tour guide narrates a building that is currently, behind him, on fire.
if you’d like the long-form version of the cousins of this idea, sorted into types, that one is older and more patient than i am right now. the one about what the word fool actually carries inside it is gentler, although a fool is, in many cultures, just the person who put the fork in the microwave first and got an audience.
somewhere in this i should mention the_algorithm, the one i blame whenever a documentary about bread shows up in my feed for the third time. the algorithm is a bias factory in a hoodie. it learns my shortcuts and sells them back to me, slightly faster. like the chair, but with ads. mike, who has a system for taxes and has not filed since 2019, says the algorithm doesn’t have him because he doesn’t have it. mike is wrong about taxes and right about this.
i’d recommend the film Moneyball for the part where the smartest person in the room is the one most aware of how much his own gut is lying to him. i’ve watched it four times. i still believed the bowl was microwave-shaped.
verdict, the bias makes the call, i sign the receipt
so. after the chart. after the list. after the chatgpt tab. after the subscription audit. after the seventh microwave on the kitchen floor with the door open. after the fork. after the budget training carla is leading without me. after sarah, who, i should add, has a pension she actually understands and a system for choosing it that does not involve metal bowls.
here are my findings, presented to you, the reader, the jury, the future ergonomics committee:
the bias makes the call. i sign the receipt. that’s the whole shape of it. the receipt is, occasionally, smoking.
i submit the seventh microwave for review, which is overstating it — review implies a panel, and the only panel here is me at the desk, the chart, and one phone at 23%.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
the seventh microwave is still on the kitchen floor with the door open and the light on
p.s. the subscription for the meditation product canceled itself on tuesday at 2:14pm, exactly when the microwave gave up. the universe, occasionally, does its own audit. it does not send a receipt.
