202 - Desirability Bias (rebroadcast)

You Are Not So Smart

Science, Psychology, Brain, Business, Mental Health, Culture, Neuroscience, Mind, Health

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek evidence that supports our beliefs and confirms our assumptions when we could just as well seek disconfirmation of those beliefs and assumptions instead. Confirmation is such a prevalent feature of human cognition, that until recently a second bias has been hidden in plain sight. Recent research suggests that something called desirability bias may be just as prevalent in our thinking. When future desires and past beliefs are incongruent, desire wins out. - Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com- Become a patron at: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the you are not so smart podcast episode
0:27.6	two oh two I'm going to play something for you and I want you to listen to it with
0:48.8	the intention of detecting something unusual within the sound something
0:54.0	distinct
1:07.6	within all of that noise was a snippet of audio created by Matt Davis who is a scientist
1:12.9	at the MRC cognition and brain sciences unit at Cambridge University he
1:17.9	researches what's going on in your brain when you try to understand language here is
1:22.6	the snippet from his research right now that sounds like noise to you and I want you
1:33.3	to say that feeling because where we are going next you can never go back I'll play
1:39.0	it one more time and then we will cross the cognitive point of no return when it comes
1:48.8	to the development of your brain there's a history a timeline in which there is a you
1:55.2	before you heard the next segment and a you after you hear it and after you hear it you
2:03.4	can never ever go back
2:18.8	right now your brain has no idea what to do with all of that noise it wants to make sense
2:27.5	of it but it can't this is excruciating to the brain because other than keeping your
2:33.9	body alive it's greatest talent the task it is most eager to perform is pattern recognition
2:40.7	the reason we have podcast and popcorn spaghetti and smartphones is pattern recognition
2:46.7	we landed on the moon because we are amazing at pattern recognition but a lot of people
2:52.5	also think we didn't land on the moon because we are amazing at pattern recognition
3:05.0	we talk about confirmation bias a lot on this show and that's because confirmation bias
3:10.5	is if not the foundation of almost always a crucial ingredient in self delusion irrational
3:17.6	behavior and motivated reasoning confirmation bias is central to how we fool ourselves into
	...

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