You Control Less Than You Think: Illusion of Control
Every day, shortly before nine o’clock, a man with a red hat stands in a square and begins to wave his cap around wildly. After five minutes, he disappears. One day, a policeman comes up to him and asks:”What are you doing?” “I’m keeping the giraffes away.” “But there aren’t any giraffes here.” “Well, I must be doing a good job, then.”
A friend with a broken leg was stuck in bed and asked me (Rolf Dobelli) to pick up a lottery ticket for him. I went to the store, checked a few boxes, wrote his name on it, and paid. As I handed him the copy of the ticket, he balked: “Why did you fill it out? I wanted to do that. I’m never going to win anything with your numbers!” “Do you really think it affects the draw if you pick the numbers?” I inquired. He looked at me blankly.
Don’t Take News Anchors Seriously: Chauffeur Knowledge
After receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918, Max Planck went out tour across Germany. Wherever he was invited, he delivered the same lecture on new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur grew to know it by heart: “It has to be boring giving the same speech each time, Professor Planck. How about I do it for you in Munich? You can sit in the front row and wear my chauffeur’s cap. That’d give us both a bit of variety.” Planck liked the idea, so that evening the driver held a long lecture on quantum mechanics in front of a distinguished audience. Later, a physics professor stood up with a question. The drive recoiled: “Never would I have thought that someone from such an advanced city as Munich would ask such a simple question! My chauffeur will answer it.”
Why You Systematically Overestimate Your Knowledge and Abilities: Overconfidence Effect
My (Rolf Dobelli) favorite musician, Johann Sebastian Bach, was anything but a one-hit wonder. He composed numerous works. How many there were I will reveal at the end of this chapter. But for now, here’s a small assignment: How many works do you think Bach composed? Choose a range, for example, between one hundred and five hundred, aiming for an estimate that is 98 percent correct and only 2 percent off.
I (Rolf Dobelli) came across the diaries of my great-uncle recently. In 1932, he emigrated from a tiny Swiss village to Paris to seek his fortune in the movie industry. In August 1940, two months after Paris was occupied, he noted: “Everyone is certain that the Germans will leave by the end of year. Their officers also confirmed this to me. England will fall as fast as France did, and then we will finally have our Parisian lives back—albeit as part of Germany.” The occupation lasted four years.
In today’s history books, the German occupation of France seems to form part of a clear military strategy. In retrospect, the actual course of the war appears the most likely of all scenarios. Why? Because we have fallen victim to the hindsight bias.
Life is a muddle, as intricate as a Gordian knot. Imagine an invisible Martian decides to follow you around with an equally invisible notebook, recording what you do, think, and dream. The rundown of your life would consist of entries such as “drank coffee, two sugars,” stepped on a thumbtack and swore like a sailor,” “dreamed that I kissed the neighbor,” “booked vacation, Maldives, now nearly out of money,” “found hair sticking out of ear, plucked it right away,” and so on. We like to knit this jumble of details into a neat story. We want our lives to form a pattern that can be easily followed. Many call this guiding principle “meaning.” If our story advances evenly over the years, we refer to it as “identity.” “We try on stories as we try on clothes,” said Max Frisch, a famous Swiss novelist.
Why “No Pain, No Gain” Should Set Alarm Bells Ringing: The It’ll-Get-Worse-Before-It-Gets-Better Fallacy
A few years ago, I (Rolf Dobelli) was on vacation in Corsica and fell sick. The symptoms were new to me, and the pain was growing by the day. Eventually I decided to seek help at a local clinic. A young doctor began to inspect me, prodding my stomach, gripping my shoulders and knees, and then poking each vertebra. I began to suspect that he had no idea what my problem was, but I wasn’t really sure so I simply endured the strange examination. To signal its end, he pulled out his notebook and said: “Antibiotics. Take one tablet three times a day. It’ll get worse before it gets better.” Glad that I now had a treatment, I dragged myself back to my hotel room with the prescription in hand.
Why We Prefer a Wrong Map to None at All: Availability Bias
Smoking can’t be that bad for you: My grandfather smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and lived to be more than a hundred.” Or: “Manhattan is really safe. I know someone who lives in the middle of the Village and he never locks his door. Not even when he goes on vacation, and his apartment has never been broken into.” We use statements like these to try to prove something, but they actually prove nothing at all. When we speak like this, we succumb to the availability bias.
Leave Your Supermodel Friends at Home: Contrast Effect
In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini tells the story of two brothers, Sid and Harry, who ran a clothing store in 1930s America. Sid was in charge of sales and Harry led the tailoring department. Whenever Sid noticed that the customers who stood before the mirror really liked their suits, he became a little hard of hearing. He called to his brother: “Harry, how much for this suit?” Harry looked up from his cutting table and shouted back: “For that beautiful cotton suit, forty-two dollars.” (At that time, it was a completely inflated price.) Sid pretended as if he hadn’t understood: “How much?” Harry yelled again: “Forty-two dollars!” Sid then turned to his customer and reported: “He says twenty-two dollars.” At this point, the customer would have quickly put the money on the table and hastened from the store with the suit before poor Sid noticed his “mistake.”
