Greed or need?
A few days back I wrote about “Am I saving enough?” Thank you for all your comments. I am just afraid that those people with their benchmark savings ratios are not really representative of the regular guys. Could it be…
Category: Biases The factory default settings of the human brain were essential in the past to secure our survival.
In modern times, however, that inner con man plays tricks on us that can end quite costly.
The Backfire Effect
We all have a preferential set of intuitions, feelings, and ideas. Less poetically characterized by the term “bias”. These little quirks in our thinking pose a challenge to our ability to weigh evidence accurately to arrive at truth. Bias is…
The Well-Travelled Road Bias
Nowadays I am a bit more on the road visiting prospects to share with them those benefits my value-add-products could deliver to their operations. As such I come across this common experience for motorists more frequently: I am driving somewhere…
8 Truths I do like to remind myself of
Busy schedules and weekly routines have a tendency to put my brain on autopilot and I lose sight of the important things in life. Some of life’s essential truths need repeating. So, I’d better write them down: MY SELF-WORTH…
It happened again – Self-enhancing transmission bias
I caught myself again yesterday. I was having coffee with an ex-colleague of mine. Back from the phase in my life when I was doing my ‘corporate duty’. I do like to occasionally check in with my ex-colleagues to see…
Why ETFs are a good tool to slaughter some of our biases
Being biased brings with it that we don’t think like we think we think. We make illogical decisions. Passive index fund investing via a Regular Savings Plan or Dollar-Cost-Averaging is logically right, right? But emotionally and in terms of common…
How much does money matter to you?
There is no denying the fact that our lives are determined by our unconscious beliefs about money. So, what do you really believe when it comes to money? I am convinced that discovering and exploring our general attitude towards money…
The Ostrich Effect
I initially wanted to put off writing about this fallacy, but I cannot avoid it. Psychologists use this term to describe the decision to ignore dangerous or negative information by “burying” one’s head in the sand—like an ostrich—and hoping it would disappear. The…
Remember the App “FarmVille”? It’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action
Oops! Despite trying to understand more than 60 cognitive biases by writing about them, I just realized that I have yet to share anything about the “classic”—the Sunk Cost Fallacy. And although I have written about its sister biases Loss and Regret Aversion, they alone leave gaps…
Let’s regress to the mean together
…but before we do that, allow me to elaborate a bit on it. Regression to the Mean (RTM) is the tendency for trends to flip with the passage of time; it’s nature’s way of levelling the playing field. Most things on Earth revert to…
The factory default settings of the human brain were essential in the past to secure our survival.
In modern times, however, that inner con man plays tricks on us that can end quite costly.
The Backfire Effect
We all have a preferential set of intuitions, feelings, and ideas. Less poetically characterized by the term “bias”. These little quirks in our thinking pose a challenge to our ability to weigh evidence accurately to arrive at truth. Bias is…
The Well-Travelled Road Bias
Nowadays I am a bit more on the road visiting prospects to share with them those benefits my value-add-products could deliver to their operations. As such I come across this common experience for motorists more frequently: I am driving somewhere…
8 Truths I do like to remind myself of
Busy schedules and weekly routines have a tendency to put my brain on autopilot and I lose sight of the important things in life. Some of life’s essential truths need repeating. So, I’d better write them down: MY SELF-WORTH…
It happened again – Self-enhancing transmission bias
I caught myself again yesterday. I was having coffee with an ex-colleague of mine. Back from the phase in my life when I was doing my ‘corporate duty’. I do like to occasionally check in with my ex-colleagues to see…
Why ETFs are a good tool to slaughter some of our biases
Being biased brings with it that we don’t think like we think we think. We make illogical decisions. Passive index fund investing via a Regular Savings Plan or Dollar-Cost-Averaging is logically right, right? But emotionally and in terms of common…
How much does money matter to you?
There is no denying the fact that our lives are determined by our unconscious beliefs about money. So, what do you really believe when it comes to money? I am convinced that discovering and exploring our general attitude towards money…
The Ostrich Effect
I initially wanted to put off writing about this fallacy, but I cannot avoid it. Psychologists use this term to describe the decision to ignore dangerous or negative information by “burying” one’s head in the sand—like an ostrich—and hoping it would disappear. The…
Remember the App “FarmVille”? It’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action
Oops! Despite trying to understand more than 60 cognitive biases by writing about them, I just realized that I have yet to share anything about the “classic”—the Sunk Cost Fallacy. And although I have written about its sister biases Loss and Regret Aversion, they alone leave gaps…
Let’s regress to the mean together
…but before we do that, allow me to elaborate a bit on it. Regression to the Mean (RTM) is the tendency for trends to flip with the passage of time; it’s nature’s way of levelling the playing field. Most things on Earth revert to…