Misguided Thinking
How to Spot a Common Mental Error That Leads to Misguided Thinking
Misguided thinking happens when we mistakenly over-emphasize one outcome and ignore the others. For example, let’s say you visit Spain and someone rudely shoves past you in a queue. Then, you go to a restaurant and the waiter is very rude to you. Finally, you are waiting in a shop for to be served and the shop assistant is chatting on her mobile phone.
When you think back on your trip to Spain it is easy to remember these experiences and conclude that “people from Spain are rude” or “foreign people are rude.”
However, you are forgetting about all of the meals you’ve eaten when the waiter acted perfectly normal or the many people who waited in line behind you and who didn’t cut in. These were literally non-events because nothing notable happened. As a result, it is easier to remember the times someone acted rudely toward you than the times when you dined happily or stood in an uneventful queue.
Here’s where the brain science comes into play:
Hundreds of psychology studies have proven that we tend to overestimate the importance of events we can easily recall and underestimate the importance of events we have trouble recalling. The easier it is to remember, the more likely we are to create a strong relationship between two things that are weakly related or not related at all.
How to spot Misguided Thinking
There is a simple strategy you can use to spot your hidden assumptions and prevent yourself from using this Misguided Thinking. It’s called a contingency table and it forces you to recognize the non-events that are easy to ignore in daily life.
Let’s take the myth “A full moon actually impacts our behaviour”
Let’s break down the possibilities for having a full moon and a crazy night of hospital admissions.
Back to News
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Cell A: Full moon and a busy night. This is a very memorable combination and is over-emphasized in our memory because it is easy to recall.
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Cell B: Full moon, but nothing happens. This is a non-event and is under-emphasized in our memory because nothing really happened. It is hard to remember something not happening and we tend to ignore this cell.
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Cell C: No full moon, but it is a busy night. This is easy to dismiss as a “crazy day at work.”
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Cell D: No full moon and a normal night. Nothing memorable happens on either end, so these events are easy to ignore as well.
This contingency table helps reveal what is happening inside the minds of nurses during a full moon. The nurses quickly remember the one time when there was a full moon and the hospital was overflowing, but simply forget the many times there was a full moon and the patient load was normal. Because they can easily retrieve a memory about a full moon and a crazy night and so they incorrectly assume that the two events are related.
How to fix your Misguided Thinking
We make illusory correlations in many areas of life:
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You hear about Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of college to start a billion-dollar business and you over-value that story in your head. Meanwhile, you never hear about all of the college dropouts that fail to start a successful company. You only hear about the hits and never hear about the misses even though the misses far outnumber the hits.
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You see someone of a particular ethnic or racial background getting arrested and so you assume all people with that background are more likely to be involved in crime. You never hear about the 99 percent of people who don’t get arrested because it is a non-event.
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You hear about a shark attack on the news and refuse to go into the ocean during your next beach vacation. The odds of a shark attack have not increased since you went in the ocean last time, but you never hear about the millions of people swimmingly safely each day. The news is never going to run a story titled, “Millions of Tourists Float in the Ocean Each Day.” You over-emphasize the story you hear on the news and make an illusory correlation.
Most of us are unaware of how our selective memory of events influences the beliefs we carry around with us on a daily basis. We are incredibly poor at remembering things that do not happen. If we don’t see it, we assume it has no impact or rarely happens.
If you understand how these errors in thinking occur and use strategies like the Contingency Table Test mentioned above, you can reveal the hidden assumptions you didn’t even know you had and correct the misguided thinking that plagues our everyday lives