But I think approximately everyone has at least one of those beliefs; it’s just not that obvious because many of these strange beliefs are idiosyncratic, and people often hide them from each other and sometimes even from themselves (by avoiding thinking about that belief, or by not reflecting on how crazy the belief would seem to others).

For one person, the weird belief may be their lucky coin (see this lovely essay that I learned about from @mariellevolz after writing a first draft of this essay).

For another person, it may be an unsupported belief that they are unlovable.

For a third person, it might be an attachment to a certain diet that they’re convinced would solve all sorts of problems if everyone would just go on it (like they did).

Or it could be a strange belief they learned from their childhood religion, which everyone except adherents of their exact denomination of their religion sees as ridiculous.

And so on.

Because I think just about everyone has strange false beliefs like this, I try not to judge people too much based on the fact that they have a “weird” belief that I think is way out of alignment with reality. Of course, even if I’m right, that doesn’t mean everyone is an equally “bad” thinker.

Some people think, “That person believes X, what an idiot,” and write the person off. I aspire not to do that based on one crazy belief but rather to look at a person’s beliefs and how they arrive at their beliefs more holistically.

Being an effective thinker is better measured by how we do, on average, on the important things (weighted by their importance) rather than the worst thinking we do on any single topic.

I also believe that with time and consistent effort, we all can get better at thinking clearly and that it’s a worthwhile investment for most people.

But even with hard work, we’re unlikely to get to zero weird false beliefs.

This piece was first written on February 2, 2024, and first appeared on my website on March 7, 2024.

Some remarkable things I suspect are true of nearly all adults: 

1) We each hold some beliefs that are almost totally non-responsive to evidence involving some combination of our identity (who we are), our group, the nature of reality (e.g., God), or the nature of what’s good.

Examples:

• Many have an unshakable belief that they are good even as they harm the world (or believe they’re insufficient even though they’re altruistic and productive)

• Most have an unshakable belief that their in-group is good and any group opposing their group is bad

2) We assume that other people’s internal experiences are more similar to our internal experiences than they really are. Consequently, we tend to predict they’ll behave more like us than they really will.

Example:

• You’re an anxious person who avoids situations you’re afraid of, so you predict other people will be more afraid of similar situations than they really will be and that they’ll be more avoidant than they really will be

3) Emotions alter our behaviors and thoughts (increasing the likelihood of some behaviors and thoughts, decreasing the likelihood of others) in emotion-dependent ways.

Examples: 

• Physical disgust increases the chance of backing away and reduces the chance of eating soon

• Feelings of depression increase the chance of thinking thoughts about situations being hopeless or actions being pointless

4) How good or bad we feel about something happening depends on the difference between our expectations about what will happen and the reality of what actually happened.

Examples: 

• If you think someone with a gun is about to shoot, but instead, they take your wallet and run, you might feel relief (whereas normally wallet theft would be highly distressing) 

• If you expect to make $300k on a deal, you might feel bad if you “only” get $200k

5) We have multiple “drives” encoded in our brains that want different things (e.g., they have different values or goals), and these often come into conflict. Our behavior is influenced by which drives are activated and how strongly each is activated.

Examples: 

• If we smell delicious popcorn right in front of us, most of us will eat it, whereas if it’s a few feet away and we can’t smell it, we’re less likely to 

• If we’re exhausted but also slightly hungry, we may delay making food until we are more hungry or less tired

6) We are influenced by the behavioral norms and patterns demonstrated by the people around us, especially when they are people who we identify as being part of our group or similar to us.

Example: 

• If it’s common to dress or talk a certain way in a place we move to, it will increase the chance we start to dress and talk similarly

This piece was first written on October 20, 2023, and first appeared on my website on February 7, 2024.

1. Mimicry: when our in-group promotes falsity that we copy

2. Incentives: when we predict that knowing the truth would feel bad or harm our objectives

3. Complexity: when the truth is hard to figure out

Examples:

1. Mimicry

• Some are Christians because all their friends and family are, too; some are atheists for the same reason.

• Some think that it makes sense to circumcise baby boys because the people they know think it’s healthy and normal; others think it’s bizarre because the people they know think foreskin is healthy and normal.

• Some believe it would harm Black Americans to defund police because their friends say so; others think it would help Black Americans because their friends say it.

2. Incentives

• If you make more money believing X, it’s going to be harder to stop believing it.

• If the idea of permanent death is terrifying to you, it’s going to be harder to stop believing in reincarnation.

• If it would make you feel really bad to find out you were wrong about something you posted online, your immediate reaction may be to deny being wrong (to others and to yourself) to shield yourself from the negative feelings.

Note that mimicry and incentives can blend together. Sometimes we mimic to fit in or to avoid being socially punished. But mimicry is even more basic than that: we seem to have a natural, in-built strong tendency to copy others. If all the people around us believe something, we usually will come to believe it too, without even questioning whether it might be false or even being aware that we copied the belief from others. 

If we see others all behave in a certain way, we’ll probably behave that way, too, unless we have strong reasons not to. This appears to be an evolutionary survival mechanism – it’s risky to (for example) eat plants that are different than the ones your tribe eats (they might be poisonous) or to avoid the behaviors everyone else does (those behaviors might be key to survival in some hidden way). In the wilderness, you can’t figure out how to survive from first principles (chances are you’ll die way too fast for that) – you need to mimic what has worked for centuries (some of which will be key to survival, some of which will be pointless, but evolutionary pressures will have weeded out most of the really harmful stuff and hung on to the most useful stuff).

3. Complexity

• It’s really not obvious how to prevent future risks from advanced artificial intelligence (though it often seems obvious to folks who’ve spent almost no time thinking about it).

• How best to prevent economic crashes is a fundamentally complicated question.

• Nobody actually seems to know how to cure cancers in general.

A weird thing about these three causes for believing falsehoods is that we are usually not aware of their effects.

1. We don’t usually realize it when we believe something just because we copied our social group.

2. We don’t usually realize when we believe something just because it would hurt us not to believe it.

3. We don’t usually realize when our analysis of a complex issue is oversimplified and misses important considerations.

Believing in falsehoods feels just like believing the truth – until the moment we genuinely face up to the possibility of being wrong.

So how do we be right more often?

1. To combat mimicry: we can keep our identities smaller (or have more of them), be more willing to be viewed as having “weird” beliefs, join social groups that value diversity of thought, learn to do less social mimicry (e.g., having greater skepticism towards in-group consensus). We can recognize that every in-group will get some things wrong (including ours) and that it’s worth investigating where ours is wrong. In summary, we can combat mimicry with social resilience and skepticism.

2. To combat harmful incentives: we can recognize that, while there can be short-term pain from accepting the truth, being truth-seeking is usually a better long-term strategy (especially because you can’t just suddenly decide to be truth-seeking when it’s convenient – it’s best to have a habit of being truth-seeking all the time). We can consider thought experiments like: “If X were true, would I rather believe it or be wrong about it?”. We can also leave “lines of retreat” so that we can decide what we’d do and how we’d move forward if we turn out to be wrong on something important. In summary, we can combat bad incentives with a Scout Mindset and a focus on seeking the truth.

3. To tackle complexity: we can use probabilistic thinking, consider multiple hypotheses, and consider the evidence for and against each one. We can train ourselves in evidence and argument evaluation, practice steel-manning arguments, talk to smart and knowledgeable people with different views and fight back against overconfidence (e.g., through calibration practice). We can also do large amounts of research when it’s important to be right. In summary, we can combat complexity with good epistemic hygiene, honed thinking skills, and self-skepticism.

This piece was first written on June 3, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 11, 2022.

People often talk about what a problem “confirmation bias” is. But we rarely discuss what causes so many of us to search for information in a biased way.

Let’s explore some of the forces:

1. Echo chambers: our routine sources of information tend to support our worldview. Much of this is due to social ties (we tend to talk to people who are similar to us in age, geography, religion, etc.) We also trust news sources more if they share our basic ideology/assumptions. The authorities we look to will be the ones that agree with us on most of our fundamental assumptions (even if some of these assumptions could turn out to be wrong).

2. Soldier Mindset: as Julia Galef explains in her wonderful new book (the Scout Mindset), we are often not even TRYING to figure out the truth. We’re just trying to beat the other side or prove a point. In these cases, of course we have a biased search process.

3. Lack of doubt: when we’re really confident our basic premises are correct, we don’t see the need for a nuanced information search process. We’re going to go to whatever sources are convenient for filling in minor details, even if our beliefs have major unquestioned assumptions.

4. Advocacy: others are actively trying to get us to believe certain falsehoods. They do so through ads, websites, news, and other channels. For the most part, they themselves believe these falsehoods (promoting “the truth” as they see it), but occasionally it’s pure manipulation.

5. Fear of being wrong: it hurts to be wrong, especially if we’ve made the error publicly, have our identity tied up in the belief, or it challenges our understanding of the world or who to trust. We sometimes avoid finding out we are wrong the way we avoid touching a hot stove.

We don’t always seek out information in a biased way. For instance, when looking up driving directions or trying to figure out what paint to use to prevent water damage, we want the right answer, don’t have political biases, and usually have appropriate self-doubt and skepticism.

But we are liable to have a biased search for the truth when we are incentivized to have particular beliefs, such as when our social world supports just one perspective, when we’re trying to prove the other side wrong, when we have no doubt that we are right, when powerful others are devoting a lot of effort to persuade us, or when we’re too afraid of being wrong.

For more about this topic, you may want to check out my recent podcast episode with Julia Galef.

We can:

A. Lie to ourselves about them,

B. Avoid thinking about them, or

C. Try to accept the parts we can’t change and change what we can.

If you’re in camps A or B, don’t read this post!

Here are Thirteen Difficult Truths:

1. Irrationality – we humans are not rational, despite the fact that most of us want to believe we are. Our beliefs and behaviors are influenced by nearly-invisible social forces and numerous cognitive biases.

But I believe we can learn to become significantly more rational and that there are important personal and societal benefits from doing so. This is a major part of why I created Clearer Thinking. 

2. Wrongness – we’re wrong about some of our deeply-held beliefs. We don’t know which (being right and being wrong usually both feel like being right). We want to believe that our tribe is right, the enemy tribe dangerously wrong, and the other tribes irrelevant. The truth is much more complex and interesting.

We can be right more often by seeking out the strongest contradictory perspectives, by creating feedback loops with respect to our ideas, and by learning to play devil’s advocate to our own views.

Try, for instance, the “Belief Challenger.” 

3. Challenges – we each will experience big losses, stressors, and setbacks. Some of these could send us into a negative spiral.

This will suck, but we can build up mental health skills that help.

Try, for example, our apps https://www.uplift.app (for depression) and https://www.mindease.io (for anxiety).

4. Aging – as we grow older, we will lose physical strength, attractiveness, and perhaps also cognitive abilities.

However, by exercising regularly and eating healthy food, we can likely slow our decline. We can create hobbies and sources of joy that we can benefit from at all ages.

5. Bereavement – we will lose many of the people we love. Friendships will fray, relationships will end, and the people we love will die.

But we can focus on finding lifelong friends, exert effort to detect and repair fraying, make new friends proactively, and squeeze in all the love we can. We can also encourage our loved ones to engage in healthy habits to extend their lives.

See, for instance, “Daily Ritual: A Habit-Creation Tool.”

6. Mortality – one day, we’ll be gone.

However, by taking great care of your body, you can likely give yourself more years. By being as grateful as you can to exist each day, you may be happier during those years. By funding more rigorous life extension research, we can one day give more years to many.

See, for instance, “Longevity FAQ“.

7. Extinction – one-day, humanity will go extinct.

However, the actions we take over the coming decades/centuries could determine whether humanity lasts only a little more time or a VASTLY longer time. Our wisdom must grow faster than the power of our technology. Support and fund “existential risk” work.

See, for instance, “The case for reducing existential risks“.

8. Randomness – we’re at the mercy of a tremendous amount of luck. Some are born sick orphans in squalor, some healthy, into loving families, in wealthy countries.

We didn’t choose, but we can make the world better for others and give more people good luck.

See, for instance, “Leaving Your Mark on the World.”

9. Rejection – some people won’t like us. And whatever we do or create, some people will think it sucks.

But we can surround ourselves with people who really like and value us, who support us even if they sometimes don’t like our behavior or think our projects are pretty dumb. They help us be better.

10. We will mess up and fail many times.

But by accepting (to the best of our ability) that we (and everyone else too) will fail many times, it frees us to try harder things and to have self-compassion when we do fail. If we learn what we can from each failure, we create a silver lining (“sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.”)

See, for instance, “Learning From Mistakes.” 

11. Uncertainty – there are deep, important mysteries we will never know the answer to and major unknowns we can’t resolve. Major philosophical and personal questions of the utmost importance will go unsolved.

But we don’t need certainty to be happy. We can live with the big unknowns, even while striving as a species – and as individuals – to understand the world as best we can. We can also, at least, learn to be less of a mystery to ourselves.

See, for instance, “Life-Changing Questions.” 

12. Disappointment – we won’t get all the things we want. At some point, we’ll badly want to get a certain job, achieve a certain goal, or be with a certain person, and we’ll never get it.

But we can learn to better accept reality for what it is. And even though we can’t have all that we want, we will get some of what we want, and we can get over the things we wanted and didn’t get.

See, for instance, our article on resetting your psychological baseline.

13. Animality – we are creatures who can reason, speak, understand physics, invent ideas, write stories, think abstractly, transform the world, etc., and yet we are also animals at the same time. We aspire to be something more than animals, and yet we have animal bodies, drives, constraints, reactions, and impulses.

But we can learn to work with, rather than against, our animal nature. When our inner mouse is afraid of something we know is not dangerous, we can learn to soothe it. When our inner dog badly wants something that we know is not in our long-term interest, we can make a compromise by giving ourselves something else we desire that is not so out of alignment with our goals. When our inner bee wants to copy others in doing something that violates our values, we can find other ways to fit in without compromising our integrity, or we can find a new colony that suits us better.

Importantly, since these are difficult truths for all of us, we can face them together, seeking to help one another.

For me, reflecting on the difficult truths that we all face gives new meaning to the idea that we should “be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle.”

It’s tough being a human. But thankfully, we are not alone. Let’s make the best of this together.

This piece was first written on March 5, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 28, 2022.

I pointed out why this claim is impossible. As warm water cools it must eventually reach the same temperature that the cool water started at. From that point on, the warm water will behave just like the cool water, but it will have taken the warm water a while to even get into that state. Freezing occurs at the same temperature for both warm and cold water, but warm water of course will take longer to get to that temperature.

This isn’t quite 1+1=2, it’s more like 23+14=37. I double checked my answer and was 98% confident. It’s amazing what some people will believe, and how powerful reasoning is at solving these sorts of problems.

But I was wrong. And not just a little bit. In fact there are tons of ways that warm water might be able to freeze faster. This is the so-called Mpemba effect, observed by the likes of Aristotle, Descartes, and Francis Bacon.

The fact that the water has previously been warmed contributes to its freezing quickly: for so it cools sooner. Hence many people, when they want to cool hot water quickly, begin by putting it in the sun.

-Aristotle

My wrongness here isn’t so much about being wrong about the effect, per se. The extent to which this effect is real, and under exactly what conditions, can reasonably be debated. My wrongness is in being convinced I was right when I couldn’t have known I was. I couldn’t possibly have ruled out all the possibilities in a single minute. For example, I didn’t even consider these ideas that came up after two minutes of googling:

• Evaporation : the warm water evaporates, meaning there is less water to freeze.
• Frost: the cool water may be more likely to freeze from the top (with the frost trapping in further heat) whereas the warm water may be more likely to freeze from the bottom and sides.
• Convection: warm water and cold water produce different currents, which could alter the heat distribution.
• Supercooling: if free of impurities and in the right conditions, water can actually drop below freezing temperature without freezing, and the propensity for supercooling might be affected by the starting temperature.
• Conductivity: the hotter liquid might melt an existing layer of frost that is preventing the liquid from directly touching a much colder surface.

What could have prevented me from making such a ridiculous error? How could I have noticed that I was being insanely overconfident? There are a few signs that should have tipped me off:

• Lack of expertise: The physics of heat and fluids is outside of my domain of expertise. I should have recognized that this is not a subject I know a lot about and so been more skeptical of my own opinions.
• A simple model: I was employing a very simple model for the situation (involving just the temperature of the water). While beautiful, and easy to work with, really simple models rarely capture all the details of a situation. For instance, I didn’t consider the possibility of evaporation or frost, because those variables weren’t included in my model. If you’re using a simple model, you should consider whether you’re missing important factors.
• Insufficient time: If you haven’t thought about something for very long yet you are already very opinionated, you might want to think about it longer.
• Didn’t consider alternatives:  I didn’t even try to think of ways that this effect could be real. Instead, I came up with an argument why it couldn’t be real, and that argument sounded convincing to me, so I stopped thinking. This problem is the big one. So here’s a 30 minute free mini-course I designed to train you to avoid exactly this problem.

Reasoning is only as good as the reasoner. And we humans don’t have the best track record. The trouble is, it’s easy to find arguments that seem totally convincing. The trick is that we shouldn’t just try to convince ourselves that we are right. We should try to convince ourselves that we are wrong. If we do that in earnest, we’ll be much more likely to end up with the right opinion.

*Ice photograph by Dingske.

It could be the case that we almost always act for good reasons, and that our explanations accurately reflect these reasons. But let’s consider an alternative hypotheses. Let’s suppose that much of our decision-making is influenced by factors that seem like they should be irrelevant, but that affect us below the level of conscious awareness. In that case, our attempts to explain our own behavior would often be incomplete. We would attribute our decision to X, when in fact Y and Z were also factors, perhaps as important as X. But, since we would be unaware of Y and Z, it might seem to us like our explanation X was complete.

So how could one test this hypothesis, that people are frequently influenced by factors which they don’t notice are altering their decisions? One approach is as follows. Randomly divide a population of people into two groups, A and B, of roughly equal size. Put everyone from both groups into nearly identical situations, with the only difference being that the experience of people in A differs in a single respect from the experience of those in group B. Choose this difference to be one that participants are unlikely to believe could have a significant chance of changing their behavior, but which you as a researcher think could in fact alter behavior in a specific way. Now see if the behavior of people in group A differs strongly in the predicted way from the behavior of those in B. If it does, this is evidence that we sometimes act for reasons that we don’t understand, and that our self reports of why we act may be inaccurate or incomplete.

Many studies of this basic format have been conducted, some with quite disturbing results. Consider the following scenarios:

• An ordinary looking man comes up to you on the street and asks you for a dime. Take a moment to think of what factors would influence your decision as to whether to give him the money. Would you be influenced by how he is dressed? By whether he smiles? What behaviors could this person do to make it much more likely that you would comply?
• A stranger asks you on a date, or asks you to dance at a club. Presumably your decision of whether to agree might depend on how good-looking you think the person is. But what other, subtler factors, might influence your decision?

It turns out that a powerfully influential factor in these cases is whether the person gives you a brief touch on the upper arm when making their request. As Richard Wiseman notes in his book 59 seconds, researchers have consistently found effects from physical contact. In one such study, a person asking for a dime was 20% more likely to get the money when they asked with a quick touch than without. In another study, 1.5 times more women accepted an offer to dance when a touch was used than when it wasn’t (with the acceptance rate jumping from 43% to 65%). A third study found that when attractive men asked out women on the street, their success rate doubled from 10% to 20% when they used a brief touch. People would never say “I decided to go out with him because he touched me on the arm”, and yet, it seems that about half of the women in the “touch group” of this latter study would in fact not have accepted the date without that momentary touch. Presumably, few if any of the women realized this.

Another fertile source of insight into decision-making is the book Yes!, on the tactics of persuasion. Consider these scenarios:

• You are staying in a hotel and find a note that asks you to reuse your towels (as opposed to leaving them to be cleaned) in order to help protect the environment. You’d expect your level of devotion to environmental causes to influence whether you comply. But could it be the case that an alteration to the note could make your compliance much more likely? In one study, it was found that simply mentioning that the majority of people who stayed in your hotel room followed the request caused a 33% increase in people reusing towels. Yet, if these hotel guests were asked why they agreed to reuse their towels, it seems unlikely that many would say it was because other people did it too. We often subconsciously take cues from others which influence how we act.
• You get a phone call one day from a group conducting a study for a “public service publication”, and they would like you to participate. The person on the phone says that participation will involve “five or six men from our staff coming into your home some morning for about 2 hours to enumerate and classify all the household products that you have.” What simple trick could this organization use to substantially increase the chance that you will say yes? It was found that when homeowners were called three days before this request in order to give them a phone interview about their product use for the same publication, they were 2.4 times more likely to agree to the later, much more invasive request. Those who didn’t receive an earlier call agreed to allow the surveying men to come 22% of the time, compared to 53% of those who did receive an advance call. And yet, it seems unlikely that those people whose behavior was altered by the non-invasive phone survey would be aware that it was an essential ingredient in their decision. Agreeing to do something small can unwittingly make us far more willing to do a similar but much larger thing later on.
• You receive a survey in the mail, sent by a stranger, along with a typed request that you complete it. Presumably, if you find the survey topic interesting, you may be more likely to do so. But regardless of your interest level, what variable could the sender change to make you much more likely to fill it out? In one study it was found that if a handwritten sticky note was attached that requested the survey be completed, the chance that the survey was returned was more than doubled, from 36% to 75%. The slight increase in effort and personal touch of attaching a hand written sticky note made people substantially more likely to want to help out.

Do these sorts of effects only hold on unimportant choices? Let’s consider some decisions where money or lives are at stake.

• You are interviewing college students for a job. Presumably you will take into account their quantity of work experience and grade point average. And yet, in one study, total months of work experience and grade point average did not have a statistically significant effect on whether candidates were offered a job. What did have a significant positive effect was whether the candidates tried to ingratiate themselves with the interviewer (e.g. by conforming to the interviewers opinions and offering favors). We naturally want to hire people that we feel positively towards, even when we believe ourselves to be evaluating them on objective criteria.
• You want to buy a subscription to the economist. You can choose the web only version for $59, or for $125 get the print version which also includes web access. Which would you select, and why? Surely after the fact you would be able to explain why one would be more right for you than the other. But as Dan Ariely discusses in his book Predictably Irrational, when he conducted a study on this scenario he found that adding a third subscription option which nobody selected massively altered people’s behavior. If a $125 print only version is included as an option, which is similar to the $125 print-and-web option but strictly worse, the preferences of subjects switched from 32% favoring the print-and-web version to a whopping 84% preferring it. The latter group thought they were choosing for good reasons, but in fact many of them changed their minds due merely to the decoy option being offered. The decoy option was clearly worse than the print-and-web version, therefore making the latter look more compelling positive on a relative basis, even though no one wanted the decoy.
• It is your job to determine how many years someone should go to jail for illegally entering her neighbors apartment and stealing money and merchandise. Your judgement will be based on a description of the crime, as well as a photo of the criminal and routine demographic information about her. What factors do you think will alter your decision of how long a sentence you’d apply? When such a study was conducted on undergraduate students, it was found that when the photograph of the criminal was switched from an attractive woman to a substantially less attractive woman, the average prison sentence that the students assigned increased by a factor of 1.9, from 2.8 years in jail to 5.2 years. The average sentence that the less attractive photo produced was about equal to that of a control that was identical except that it included no photograph. Beauty and ugliness can substantially distort our perceptions of other people, even with regard to traits that have nothing to do with a person’s looks.
• You’re again given the task of determining the sentence that an accused criminal should receive based on details about their case. You’re also given the prosecutor’s sentencing demand, but you know this demand is random, because you determined it yourself by rolling a pair of dice and summing the values. Surely, the sentencing demand wouldn’t influence the sentence you would give. Right? In one such study, the sentences that lawyers gave in such a scenario were almost 1.5 times higher when their dice came up with high values than when the dice had low ones (the mean sentence rising from 5.3 months to 7.8 months). The values we assign to things can be substantially influenced by suggested “anchors”, even when we know intellectually that those anchors are irrelevant.
• You’re filling out a form and have the option to sign up as an organ donor. One might imagine that your sense of obligation to other people might come into play. But could the way the form is written have a large impact on this weighty decision? In one study, when people were presented with opt-out organ donation forms (or ones where a choice was forced) people said they would be willing to donate their organs at twice as high a rate compared to if they were presented with an opt-in form. Furthermore, it was found that out of a sample of 11 countries, all 4 countries that use an opt-in organ donation procedure had organ donation rates lower than all 7 countries with opt-out procedures. Yet, it seems unlikely that many people attribute their organ donation choices to whether or not they had to check a box. Sometimes the default or “standard” choice, can have a powerful effect on what we decide.

These studies, and the many others like them, raise serious questions about the extent to which we understand why we make the choices that we do. Seemingly irrelevant or unimportant information seems to powerfully alter our behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. Those influences that are subconscious are particularly pernicious, because their very nature prevents us from noticing how they affect us.

So the next time you think you know why you made a decision, don’t be so sure that the story you tell after is the actual story.

Just ask people. In a poll of high school seniors, only 2% thought they were below average in leadership ability, and 25% believed they were in the top 1% of ability to get along with others (note: this survey was conducted by the college board, and it is possible students feared the results would be shared with colleges). What an exceptional bunch this group of one million students must have been! American students are also apparently really good drivers. In another survey, 93% of them claimed to be in the top 50% of driving skill. Yet another poll found that 87% of Stanford MBA students rated their academic performance as being in the top 50%. Paradoxical grade inflation perhaps?

But it’s not just students that are convinced of their own greatness. A survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleagues. In a poll of teachers at the University of Nebraska, 68% rated themselves as being in the top 25% for teaching ability. More remarkably still, a survey of sociologists discovered that nearly half believed they would become among the top ten leaders in their field.

What’s wrong with all these people that allows them to delude themselves into thinking they are so great? The same things that are wrong with you and me. It’s painful to think that we are below average in some important way, or bested by our peers. It’s unpleasant to see ourselves as possessing many flaws, and to blame our failures on our traits rather than circumstances. Our minds tend to flee from painful thoughts, much like our hands retract from a hot stove. And we inadvertently condition ourselves: when we think about how great we are, it feels good, positively reinforcing further nice thoughts about ourselves in the future. When we admit our flaws, it hurts, and this punishment discourages future self-examination.

There certainly do exist people who have a genuinely negative self-images. Depressed people, in particular, often believe themselves to be inadequate or worthless, and there are plenty of other people with low self-esteem. Unfortunately this state is rarely a productive one, and in many cases is no more realistic than the more typical delusions of greatness. There also do seem to be some cases where people systematically downplay their abilities. For example, it may be that case that while people with below average IQs tend to overestimate their IQs on average, people who are above average underestimate them. Self reported intelligence typically has a correlation of less than 0.30 with IQ score.

One of the biggest problems with an unrealistic self-image is that it can severely impair our ability and inclination to self improve. If you already think you are an above median driver, as 93% of surveyed American students did, will you feel motivated to become a better, safer driver? If, like 68% of teachers surveyed at University of Nebraska, you believe you are in the top 25% of teaching ability, are you really going to try to improve yourself as a teacher? If you believe that you are less flawed than those around you, your sense of superiority may well make you less interested in acknowledging and reducing your flaws. Even an unrealistically negative self-image may impair self-improvement. It may cause you to overestimate the importance of small flaws, or cause you to give up if you believe you are too worthless to be fixable.

Your actual flaws don’t disappear just because you pretend you don’t have them. In fact, ignoring them will make it much more likely that they persist indefinitely. You make yourself a worse person (more deluded, less likely to improve) by pretending that you are a better person than you are. You become a better person (with beliefs more closely mirroring reality, and more motivation to change) by acknowledging your flaws and accepting that you may be a worse person than you thought. We are all significantly flawed. But with some effort, we can become less flawed.

Here’s a quick exercise you can do to help you have truer beliefs about yourself, and become an improved person.

1. Make a list of at least 3 fixable ways that you are significantly flawed. If you can’t think of three things in a few minutes, then add to this list your poor understanding of your weaknesses.

2. For each of these flaws, write down a brief explanation of how your life or the lives of others would be better if you improved the flaw.

3. Next, write down a strategy that you can carry out to improve the flaw.

4. Write down something you can do right now that will help ensure that you actually carry out this strategy.

5. Now, go ahead and do what you wrote down in step 4!

Here’s a printable version of this exercise:

To figure out how much we value our time we can ask ourselves simple questions, such as, “How much would I have to get paid to be willing to do an hour of work now?” The answer we give will not always be the same from day-to-day, or even from hour to hour. On vacation we might be in a mindset where we find work more unappealing, and so might require a higher pay. On the other hand, in times when we are strapped for cash, we might be willing to accept less pay. Our required monetary reward will also depend on how pleasurable or displeasurable we expect the work to be. And if we’ve just been working for five hours, we might require more pay for the next hour than we did for each of the last five.

Let’s consider how we might actually apply this concept of placing a monetary value on our time. Suppose that a store is giving out free mugs, but to get one, you have to wait for 10 minutes in line. Ask yourself, “How much money would a person have to pay me now to wait for ten minutes in that line on his behalf?” Suppose that you decide that you’d be willing to do this waiting for no less than $5. That means that if someone said they would pay you only $4.95 to stand in line for them, you’d turn down the offer. Now, ask yourself, “In the future, would I rather have $5 or one of these mugs they are handing out?” Or, similarly, try “Would I be willing to spend $5 now to buy one of these mugs?” If the answer is that you’d prefer to have $5 than a mug then it probably doesn’t make sense to wait in the line. In this case, you are assigning that 10 minutes of time waiting in line a value equivalent to $5, but the mug is worth less than that dollar amount to you. Put another way, you would be willing to wait in that line for $5, but if you did so, you wouldn’t actually want to buy the mug with the $5 you earned! It is reasonable therefore to think of the waiting in line as being more costly for you than the mug is valuable to you. On the other hand, if you’d rather have the mug than the $5, in that case it likely would make sense to wait in the line.

Incidentally, it may be important to frame the question as “Would I spend $5 to buy that mug if I could?” rather than “Would I sell that mug for $5 if I already had it?” The problem with the latter is that research has shown that we tend to be biased to prefer items that we currently possess to ones that we don’t yet have. So, if imagining owning the mug is enough to trigger this bias, the latter question could lead to distorted answers.

This technique of placing a monetary value on our time is particularly useful in situations where something is being offered for free, since people often sacrifice an unreasonably large amount to receive free items. Perhaps genuine pleasure is created just from knowing that you got something for free, which helps compensate for such sacrifices. But nonetheless, one should be cautious about overacting to the word “free”, which can certainly snag us with its large psychological appeal.

To consider another example, suppose that you’re trying to decide whether you should drive an extra 15 minutes each way to go to the cheaper grocery store rather than the pricier one (we’ll assume, in this case, that the two stores have equally good products). The question to then ask yourself is, “How much would I have to be paid to drive for a total of 30 minutes on someone else’s behalf?” If the answer is $10, then ask yourself, “How much do I expect to save by going to the cheap store?” If the answer is more than $10, then it probably makes sense to drive the extra distance. If the answer is less than $10, it probably doesn’t make sense.

Our brains are not necessarily going to make sensible decisions unless we explicitly reason using this process. For instance, one study showed that people said they were willing to drive a certain extra distance to save a small amount of money on small purchases, but not on large purchases, even when the dollar amount saved was equivalent in the two cases. If being paid $10 is worth 30 extra minutes of driving to you, it should be worth it to drive that 30 extra minutes to save $10 whether you are then going to be spending $20 or $20,000 at your destination.

When you are making a decision involving sacrificing your time, it can be well worth it to ask yourself, “How much would someone have to pay me to use my time in this way?” Then, ask yourself, “How much would I be willing to pay to be given what my sacrifice of time is getting me?” If the former is bigger than the latter, you should seriously consider not using your time in that manner.

It turns out that the answers produced by our reasoning system are highly impacted by our emotional state. When anxious, the probability we assign to bad events occurring increases compared to when we are excited. When depressed we tend to plan as though activities are unlikely to bring us pleasure, even ones that do bring us pleasure reliably (so we avoid friends, predict that we won’t enjoy our favorite activities, lie in bed without trying to entertain ourselves, etc.) When anxious we tend to plan for the future in a risk averse way, whereas when angry we tend to be risk seeking and often act without planning. And when we feel vulnerable we tend to construct theories about cause and effect relationships (both real and imagined) more readily and based on less data than we do when we feel safe.

Since the conclusions produced by our reasoning system are altered by our emotional state, if our goal is to get the right answers reliably while reasoning it makes sense to take into account how our current emotions are likely to alter our conclusions. To be safe, it is wise to save important reasoning for times when you are emotionally neutral. Don’t compose that email to your boss while you are still angry at him, don’t do financial planning when you are anxious, and avoid drawing conclusions about conspiracy theories when you are already feeling vulnerable.

On the flip side, our reasoning system is capable of altering our emotional state. Techniques to achieve this are discussed a great deal in the Cognitive Therapy literature. Founders of this field hit upon a remarkable finding: when you get people who are experiencing strong emotions (like anxiety or depression) to write down the thoughts running through their heads, you find that many of their thoughts are unreasonable, distorted or irrational. That is, rather than being based in sound reasoning, their negative emotions are at least in part produced and maintained by irrational, exaggerated and self-destructive thinking. So, it was theorized, correcting some of these distorted thoughts using rational thinking might lead to an improvement in the devastating emotions that people experience. And this is, in fact, precisely what happens.

When seeing a cognitive therapist, patients are taught to make Thought Records. That is, when they are experiencing unhelpful and painful emotions they take a few minutes to write down what situation just occurred and the thoughts that they are having. They then may search these thoughts for common cognitive distortions, consider the evidence for and against their thoughts, come up with “rational responses” (true statements that dispute their negative thinking), or write more balanced and realistic thoughts to replace the ones that they had. The result of this process is that the level of emotion is often reduced, and over the long-term, incorrect and unreasonable beliefs that lead to negative emotions can be altered.

If you need to get correct answers to factual questions, don’t reason while emotional. If you must reason while emotional, consider how your emotion is likely to influence your conclusions. And if you frequently suffer from unhelpful or painful emotions, consider learning about Cognitive Therapy techniques which can help you feel better and correct distortions in your thinking that may be magnifying your harmful emotions.

Influences: David Burns, Paul Ekman