An annotated and somewhat abbreviated version of a talk I did back in May 2018 for Hyper Island’s Learning Lab in New York City, focused on biases, decision making, and mental models

1. HOW BIASED HAVE YOU
BEEN TODAY?

2. Howard Gray
@howardgray // www.howardgray.net
Identifying & Overcoming Cognitive Biases

3. Entertainment Entrepreneurship
ExperiencesEducation

4. Sunday morning soccer by the Williamsburg Bridge

5. Tactics

6. I only play at the back; more
side to side than up and down
Get it, give it.
Unglamorous but effective.

7. I’d see other teams making
challenges like this…

8. And was outraged when I saw
our players assaulted like this:

9. Despite me being a qualified
(bespectacled) soccer referee, I
was blinded

10. And just like the renowned manager
of London’s Arsenal FC…

11. Why?!

12. I was experiencing something
similar to this gentleman’s
‘Reality Distortion Field’

13. “The reality distortion field was a
confounding melange of a charismatic
rhetorical style, an indomitable will,
and an eagerness to bend any fact to
fit the purpose at hand.
-Andy Hertzfeld, Apple

14. These people are also well known for a
similar trait
I wanted to find out more…for the rest
of us is it Reality Distortion Field, or
something else?

15. ?

16. WHAT IS BIAS?

17. “prejudice in favour of or against one
thing, person, or group compared
with another, usually in a way
considered to be unfair.

18. COGNITIVELY…

19. “a mistake in reasoning, evaluating or
remembering… often occurring as a
result of holding onto one's
preferences and beliefs regardless of
contrary information.

21. My Twitter feed has a fair bit
of opinion on this…

22. While I try and navigate the
various US media options

23. WHY DO WE HAVE BIASES?

24. HELP US ADDRESS 4 PROBLEMS
Problem
Information overload
Lack of meaning
A need to act quickly
Knowing what we need
to remember later
Solution
We aggressively filter
We fill in the gaps
We jump to conclusions
We remember the
‘important’ bits

25. HOW MANY?

26. HOW MANY?

27. ➤ What should we remember?
➤ Too much information
➤ Not enough meaning
➤ Need to act fast
ALL RELATE TO:

28. 20 MOST COMMON
➤ Anchoring
➤ Availability
➤ Bandwagon
➤ Blind Spot
➤ Choice-supportive
➤ Clustering
➤ Confirmation
➤ Conservatism
➤ Information
➤ Ostrich
➤ Outcome
➤ Overconfidence
➤ Placebo
➤ Pro-innovation
➤ Recency
➤ Salience
➤ Selective perception
➤ Stereotyping
➤ Survivorship
➤ Zero-risk

29. 5
of my most favoured, preferred, memorable,
useful, and completely unbiased biases.

30. SURVIVORSHIP

31. SURVIVORSHIP

32. SURVIVORSHIP
➤ History is written by the victors. But we learn false lessons
by studying victors
➤ As Nassim Taleb said, we don’t see the “silent grave” – the
lottery ticket holders who did not win
➤ We over-attribute success to things done by the successful
rather than randomness or luck
➤ We don’t see losers who acted in the same way but were
not lucky enough to succeed

33. SURVIVORSHIP
➤ Don’t focus on winners
like these two - look for
losers
➤ Take a walk in the
cemetery of failure
➤ Remember the 10 year
overnight success
➤ Understand the role of
luck

34. OVER
CONFIDENCE

35. “Overconfident professionals sincerely
believe they have expertise, act as
experts and look like experts…remind
yourself they may be in the grip of an
illusion.
- Daniel Kahnemann

36. OVER CONFIDENCE
➤ We often have to act fast in
uncertainty
➤ Experts are more prone to
over-confidence
➤ Illusion of control: we behave
as if we have some control…
when in fact we have none

37. OVER-CONFIDENCE
➤ Two professors quizzed undergraduate psychology
students on grammar, logic, and jokes, then asked
the students to estimate their scores and also
estimate how well they did relative to others
➤ The students who scored lowest had greatly
exaggerated notions of how well they did.
➤ Those who scored near the bottom estimated that
their skills were superior to two-thirds of the
other students.
➤ Those who scored higher had, as might be
expected, more accurate perceptions of their
abilities.
➤ But the group that scored highest
slightly underestimated their performance relative
to others.

38. OVER-CONFIDENCE
➤ Dunning Kruger’s experiment was inspired by
the 1995 case of a bank robber named
McArthur Wheeler
➤ Wheeler thought he knew a lot about
a peculiar chemical property of lemon juice
➤ He decided to smear the juice on his face
before executing his plan to rob the bank
➤ It didn’t work. His over-confidence in his
beliefs left him with egg on his face instead

39. OVER-CONFIDENCE
➤ What don’t I know?
➤ Is this objective
information?
➤ What’s out of my control?
➤ Which internal factors may
I be attributing too much
towards?

40. AVAILABILITY

41. AVAILABILITY
➤ My friend Johnny is beach body ready
➤ He offered me a beer. He was drinking
and looks healthy
➤ I’d seen other people do and look the
same, so why not?
➤ We over-weigh the information that’s
available to us
➤ This distorts our understanding of real
risks

42. AVAILABILITY
“Once one becomes
sufficiently well known,
one's name surfaces
automatically as soon
as an award committee
assembles”
Aka “staying in the
game”

43. AVAILABILITY
➤ Which ideas do I not
already know that I can
apply to the situation at
hand?
➤ Am I overly fond of this
existing idea?
➤ What other information
could be useful to help me
understand this?

44. ANCHORING

45. ANCHORING
➤ We’re over-reliant on
the first piece of
information we hear,
whether price or miles
on the clock
➤ We also overweigh the
significance of new or
bizarre information.
Maybe that’s why we
like to tell tall stories.
Why was Danny deVito clocking the cars in ‘Matilda’?

46. ANCHORING
➤ Which other frames can I
apply to this piece of
information? (both
positive and negative)
➤ Am I overvaluing this just
because it’s new, novel, or
the first thing I saw?
➤ What do you think about this
work?

47. ANCHORING
➤ When negotiating, get the other
side to go first rather than
putting your own anchor out
there

48. CLUSTERING

49. CLUSTERING
➤ We only get a tiny sliver of the world’s
information and filter out almost everything
else.
➤ We find stories and patterns even in sparse
data.
➤ Because we like stories that make sense, our
brain reconstructs the world to feel complete
inside our heads.
➤ Toss a coin 999 times and its heads. What’s
the 1000th result?

50. CLUSTERING
Gambler’s Fallacy

51. CLUSTERING
Michael Mauboussin’s Skill-Luck Continuum

52. CLUSTERING
➤ Am I simplifying the
probabilities and numbers
to make them easier to
think about?
➤ Am I underestimating the
role of luck vs skill?
➤ Which story am I telling
myself?

53. SURVIVORSHIP
OVER-CONFIDENCE
AVAILABILITY
ANCHORING
CLUSTERING

55. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
➤ Overvaluing a school when hiring
➤ Placing too much importance on the first
number when talking about salary
➤ Ignoring risks because of our expertise
➤ Undervaluing ourselves because we only see
the victors
➤ Choosing an option because we’re fond of it

56. FURTHER READING
➤ Design Hacks: Cognitive Bias Codex
➤ Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Black Swan
➤ Michael Mauboussin: The Success Equation -
Untangling Skill & Luck
➤ Buster Benson’s Cognitive Bias Cheatsheet
➤ Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational
➤ Shane Parrish: Farnam Street blog and podcast

57. “I know that most people - not only those considered
clever, and capable of understanding most difficult
scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems -
can very seldom discern even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit
the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps
with much difficultly - conclusions of which they are
proud, which they have taught to others, and on
which they have built their lives.

58. HOW BIASED HAVE YOU
BEEN TODAY?

59. THANKS!
@howardgray
www.howardgray.net