We often discuss how your brain can trick you and, by proxy, how you can hack your brain, but there are a few things our minds are very good at tricking us into that we should be aware of. This video from the folks at DNews is a crash course in three of them: Sunk cost, optimism bias, and confirmation bias.
The video’s about three minutes long, but it serves as a great crash course for some of the nastier things our brains are hard-wired to do, even if we think we have the willpower to do something differently. For example, the sunk cost fallacy is that thing that makes us prioritize what we’ve lost over what we could possibly gain—leading us to keep eating when we’re full, justify poor buying decisions, or make us keep watching a TV show that we say we hate. The video also tackles the topic of optimism bias, or our natural tendency to believe that bad things just won’t happen to us, even if we’re the ones engaging in behaviors that are bad for us. Of course, optimism bias is a good and a bad thing, and helps us strive to better, greater things.
