The good bias ๐
"We make many of our most important choices based on cognitive delusions."
โPsychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
> delusional optimism | risky
It was in 1977 that psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky revealed the real reason why people like me are serially late to work.
Iโm joined in my serial lateness by some 60 million Americans.
Tversky and Kahneman uncovered a feature of the human mind known today as the "optimism bias." This cognitive bias prompts people to chronically misjudge or be overly optimistic about the time needed to complete a given task.
Take, say, arriving on time for work. โฐ โดต
- Minor lateness is not an overt gesture of disrespect no matter what our feelings and emotions try to say.
- Is it in the best interests of an employer to put feelings and emotions before performance in evaluating workers?
Also known as the "planning fallacy," the optimism bias can't be casually turned off by tardiness offenders like me.
It affects more than just writers and coffee-shop baristas.
The planning fallacy can subdue unwitting business executives and cause them to make irreparably bad judgments. It happens endlessly even to people we would call "perfectly intelligent."
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about the discovery of the optimism bias for the Harvard Business Review in 2003 after his legendary research partner, Amos Tversky, passed away:
>> "In its grip, managers make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations."
- next time "Nope."
- listening KRS-One "The Sound You Miss"
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