3BI: resolutions for happiness, Larry David and the empathy gap, and Hindsight Bias
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Hello and happy New Year’s Eve! We did it. We made it through 2020.
It’s been…a year, to say the least. Hard times are when it’s even more important to practice gratitude, though, and I’m incredibly grateful for all of you who’ve subscribed and read the newsletter this year.
One of my big goals for the year was to write more, but I was pretty nervous to do this at the beginning. Seeing people subscribe, read it each week, and share their feedback and appreciation has been incredible, though.
So, THANK YOU. I want to make this newsletter bigger and better for you all in 2021, so reach out any time to let me know what you like, don’t like, or think I could be doing differently.
And here’s to a much happier and healthier 2021 and a roaring 20’s ahead of us.
Hindsight is 20/20
It’s hard to think of a year more unpredictable than 2020. Of course, that won’t stop people from claiming they saw everything coming, from a once in a century pandemic to all time stock highs during an abrupt economic contraction.
This is Hindsight Bias - when people feel that they “knew it all along” and believe that an event was more predictable after its outcome becomes known than before. In other words, when we’re looking back at an event after it already happened, knowing that outcome influences our perception of the events leading up to it.
Hindsight Bias is one of the most commonly recognized cognitive biases. We’re all familiar with phrases like “hindsight is 20/20.” We’re less familiar with the psychology behind why it happens, and especially of what the ramifications are, though.
Why does this happen? Our brains are desperately trying to make sense of the world, and to do that, we constantly search for clear causes and effects that connect chains of events. Understanding that cause and effect is an essential skill for survival, but when we succumb to hindsight bias, we oversimplify those explanations. We see unpredictable events as obvious only after they’ve occurred.
“Looking back into the past, we often think we can understand how things really were—like what caused the 2008 financial crisis, the collapse of communism, or the first world war—because we know how things turned out,” said Professor Nick Chater of Warwick Business School. “But now we know about hindsight bias we should be suspicious of this ‘feeling of understanding’. The idea we can look back on history and understand it should be viewed with skepticism.”
Hindsight bias has major implications for fields like business, law, medicine, politics, and history. Take the example of a radiologist who was sued for missing a newly developing tumor in a patient. With the benefit of hindsight, it was easy for expert witnesses to point out the tumor in older scans, but would they have actually caught it in the moment? Hindsight Bias plays a major role in such thorny questions.
I dove into Hindsight Bias in depth for my friend Nir Eyal’s blog. Check it out here. This may be the most thorough article I’ve written yet, so if you need a good long read to fill in your extra time over the holiday weekend, you’re in luck!
Curb your empathy gap
It’s time for New Year’s resolutions, when we make plans to match our aspirations with reality. We’ve all experienced how much harder it is to stick to well-intentioned plans in the heat of the moment, though.
One reason for this is the empathy gap, which describes our tendency to underestimate the influence of varying mental states on our own behavior and make decisions that only satisfy our current emotion, feeling, or state of being. We’re all about giving up fast food until we’re busy, starving and craving the taste.
I’ll be writing more about resolutions next week, but in the meantime think about who can take the role of Larry David in the Curb Your Enthusiasm clip below. How will you stick to your plans when emotions are pulling you another way?
Resolutions for happiness
Speaking of resolutions, some of the world’s top happiness researchers were polled on the most effective & feasible ways for people to make themselves happier. At at high level, the best options for individuals are:
Investing in social networks.
Doing meaningful things.
Caring for one’s health.
Plan your resolutions accordingly. See the full chart below.
Other stuff
The scientific breakthrough of the year: COVID-19 vaccines.
How vaccine innovation has speeded up over time:
Have a safe and happy new year. Onto 2021!