3 mind tricks your brain is playing on you - and how to beat them

Your brain is like the best friend who will do anything to keep you safe and sound. Anything. Sometimes that involves a mind trick. Your brain is an expert at tricking, diverting, digressing, side-stepping, sight-shifting and downright making things up just to ensure that you survive this dizzyingly complex place we call earth.

Your brain is also there in the background working away so you can enjoy chocolate, sunshine, music and whatever else makes you happy. And although it helps to know that your brain is ultimately on your side, it also helps to know when your mind employs some dubious measures in its noble ends.In short, your mind plays tricks.

This article is about some of those tricks and how to overcome them. But before we get into them, here are a few interesting facts about your brain to help make sense of it all.

Your brain is incredibly powerful

Living in your skull is the most sophisticated computational device known to man. It is an incredibly robust system that regulates everything from ponderings on the nature of the universe to your bowel movements. It runs the operating system of your mind and regulates virtually every aspect of your experience.

Your brain makes billions of calculations per second and neuroscientists indicate that, with over a quadrillion possible connections (synapses), the number of possible distinct states your brain can assume is infinite! It may not feel this way to you because so much of this happens unconsciously, but it is true.

And while your brain regulates a lot of your bodily functions, the vast majority of your brain cells perform the work of computations – calculations and predictions based on input and memory.

What this means is that it is safe to say that you are probably not utilizing your brain and mind to its optimal capacity. There is likely so much more you and I could do if we train our minds deliberately to harness its power. This brings us to the next point

Your brain is selfish – it consumes a lot of resources

The brain – the most centralized organ of your mind – demands an immense amount of energy to run relative to the rest of your body. It consumes about 20% of your body’s energy while making up only 5% of your weight. And this is at baseline.

It is not unreasonable to deduce that working hard on thinking will increase this consumption. No wonder that, without training, we tend to tire very quickly while performing difficult mental tasks. We are placing an immense demand on our body’s resources.

This is hard work. And it is why our brains, and the minds they power, have come with some shady shortcuts and tricky rules of thumb. And now we come to the main point.

Your brain is lazy

Based on the previous two points – powerful and energy-consuming – your brain powers a mind that is consequently lazy. It has to be. If it were to work through every single detail of every piece of input you encounter, in its current design, it would need an impractical amount of energy.  You would stall over every mundane detail - "do I scratch my nose with my left index finger or my right pinky? Arrrgghhhh!! So many decisions!"

Consequently, life and survival would near impossible given the complexity of our environment.So what happens? Your brain takes shortcuts. It installs heuristics and rules of thumb to govern the operation of your mind.In short, your mind plays tricks.

Not tricks like a con man would play—at least not with motives of harm to you. But tricks nonetheless.

Mind Trick #1: The Affect heuristic

You might have heard the advice not to make your decisions based on feelings, but instead, make them based on logic. That would be just dandy if you were a Vulcan or an abacus. But you are not. You are a human. And human minds have a very powerful tendency to judge situations, concepts, ideas, food and even other people based on how they make us feel. That is, how they affect us. Or their affect as psychologists say. This tendency is termed the affect heuristic.

What is a heuristic?

Heuristics are shortcuts in thinking. They help us make quick decisions about a situation especially when there is not enough information readily available to make a detailed analysis.Like Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman says in the book Thinking Fast and Slow –

the technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions – Daniel Kahneman (emphasis mine)

Based on this definition, I like to call them Heuristricks. Clever right? Anyway, the affect heuristic is a particularly interesting, powerful misleading heuristrick (I'm hoping that term sticks).

How affect affects us

You use affect to make decisions and judgement all the time. So do I. If something feels bad (or makes you feel bad) then it is bad. And if it makes you feel good, it is good. We are more likely to be persuaded by someone who delivers positive affect like humour or attractiveness than by someone who “rubs us the wrong way”. This has been shown to be true scientifically.This is mostly ok – we generally want to keep our distance from jerks. However, sometimes, the affect shortcut leads to bad errors of judgement. Remember that heuristics work behind the scenes. So that you are not even aware it is going on most of the time.This is most common when a false causation is drawn between two distinct events. An example from a researcher in emotion might help illustrate this point.

My heart skippeth, therefore this must be love

In her insightful and incisive book, How Emotions are Made, Dr Lisa Barrett shares an experience of affect. While single, she had been on a date. She had not found the suitor necessarily attractive prior. However, during the date, she felt her heart rate accelerate, she flushed a few times and she even had the proverbial butterflies in her tummy. “I must be attracted to him” she thinks to herself.

After the date was over, she went home, threw up violently and stayed in bed with the flu for several days after.This heuristrick had caused her to falsely link the feelings of excitement (affect) with her company—her date. Whereas, it was just a flu virus causing immune responses in her system.

Even though Dr Barrett does not say this in her account, I like to think that if the relationship with that date never went anywhere, she might have said to him, “It’s not you, it’s the flu.”

Identifying Affect

Be aware that the affect shortcut is real and powerful. So next time you are about to make an important decision that will affect you or someone else in a meaningful way based on a “feeling”, pause and double-check.

Is this decision sound and reasonable? Or is it just the affect heuristic at work? Try distancing yourself from the purported agent of the positive (or negative) sensations as much as you can. Give yourself space and time. If needed, make a pros and cons list and weigh each factor logically.

These are all mental counter-tricks you can use to overcome the affect subversion.Now on to the next dirty little mind trick

Mind Trick #2: Confirmation Bias

Imagine you were starting a new job and a friend of yours who has worked at the company for a long time pulled you aside and warned you to watch out for Barbara. She’s a real b@#$h she tells you. She’s also the boss so if you know what's good for you, stay clear.

Now imagine you encountered Barb on your first day in the elevator. You exchange hellos and Barb remains silent with a straight face until you disembark at your floor while Barb continues on to the proverbial “ivory tower floor”. What are your thoughts on Barb? Was she dismissive? Cold? Snobbish?

Now imagine the exact opposite—your veteran friend told you Barb was a true leader, supportive, approachable—a real class act. What are your thoughts about the elevator ride now? Was she perhaps on her way to an important meeting and needed to focus?

What has changed? That, my friend, is confirmation bias at work. And it is incredibly difficult to shake.

Powerful yet subtle

If there is one mind trick that has covertly caused untold harm, it is confirmation bias.Confirmation bias is our mind’s tendency to translate information we receive through the lens of what we already believe. It is a big part of what makes us notoriously bad at any pure form of disinterest and objectivity. And it is one of the mind’s more subversive tricks.

This mind trick might actually be a form of mental self-preservation. You see, it is important for our sanity that we maintain a coherent view of the world for our brains to be able to make accurate predictions. Confirmation bias helps with this, and this is all well and good. Except when it is not.

At these times, we struggle to change our points of view because we have built up a false pile of “evidence” supporting those views. The problem is, those evidences are not pure—they have been tainted in interpretation by confirmation bias—just like your “evidence” of Barb’s personality. And voila! You’ve been had. By your very self.

How do we overcome confirmation bias?

We can ignore it for the most part but for issues we deem important, it helps to actively seek evidence that clearly contradicts what our beliefs are. For example, regarding “bitchy Barb”, we can ask about some nice things she may have done from other co-workers. This will help us balance our perspective.

Try this for a lot of the things you are so sure of and you might be surprised how much evidence and reason is out there to the contrary. It can be quite humbling, but also immensely enlightening.

Overall, know that we all tend to interpret events in the light of our worldview in a bid to confirm what we already believe. It is at the heart of perpetuated stereotypes, stubborn but outdated social and political systems and, yes, even scientific theories. We would make a lot more progress if we tried harder at challenging our beliefs instead of blindly letting confirmation bias trick us with a false view of reality by continually slipping the tinted lenses over our eyes.

Mind Trick #3: The Bandwagon Fallacy

We are social beings. We have cultures and norms, friends and neighbours - all of which greatly impact our minds - and opens us up for some mind tricks resulting from some lazy mental shortcuts.And one important form of this trick is the bandwagon fallacy.

It means simply that we tend to believe that the more people who believe something, the more likely it is to be true. And if it is true, well we might as well join the bandwagon.

We often take the bandwagon approach when we do not have enough information or experience to make a sound decision. It is then that we use the social data of other’s experience as a quick and dirty shortcut. If that restaurant is always full, the food must be delicious. If that product has so many positive online reviews, it must be a superior product. Right? Well, right or not, our minds trick us to believe it is.

The term “best-selling” is often used by marketers to trigger the bandwagon glitch in our mental software to confer credibility to their wares. Best-selling books sell more, well, because they are best-selling. It is intuitive. Just one problem: the fact that many people believe something is no proof whatsoever that the belief is true or even sensible—in general or specifically for you. And in the truly important decisions, the bandwagon is useful, but it cannot be the primary factor in our decisions.

Sometimes, given other sources of information for our important decisions, the best thing we can do is wave graciously as the bustling bandwagon rolls by.

The bandwagon fallacy is ultimately the result of a tricky shortcut of a lazy mind that can get us through mundane day-to-day decisions but should be overridden in important ones.

How to overcome the bandwagon fallacy

I have hinted at this solution above already. But let’s make it clearer with a few underlying points. When faced with an important decision, you can overcome this bandwagon mind trick using the wisdom of the statements below.

You are not an average of anything, really, you are unique.

There are many factors that can lead to the popularity of a belief or course of action – and they may have little or no intersection with you, your abilities, beliefs or goals.

Joining the bandwagon is easy – so many people do it – so more people do it…Thinking and acting differently from the people on the bandwagon can be immensely valuable

Think about the list of statements above as a mental checklist. When faced with an important decision, think about these statements in question format. That is,

Is this bandwagon based on an average of any particular group of people?

Am I a member of that group in a meaningful way? 

Do the rules of that group apply to me?

Is this bandwagon so popular just because it is an easy one to join?

Is there any possible high-value return of success in thinking or acting differently from the bandwagon?

Use this checklist to help you decide what wagons you join, ignore or disembark.

Mind trick or think

Mind tricks will always be a part of being human. Very often they serve us, save us energy and help us navigate a complex world.

However, when important decisions need to be made, we have to overcome our mind tricks and think more deliberately so that we can win at work and in life.

Remember you own your mind, not the other way around. It is a good servant but a tricky master.

Until the next post, be your best and do you best.