Sage Solutions
Advice and insight about personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self.
Sage Solutions
Cognitive Biases: Part 2
We map 17 common cognitive biases that shape how we judge people, weigh risk, and make choices, then show simple ways to trade certainty for curiosity and move from autopilot to agency. The aim is not perfection, but practical awareness that leads to better decisions.
• egocentric and self‑serving biases color self‑perception
• fundamental attribution error and the empathy gap with others
• halo effect and the cost of first impressions
• hindsight bias and memory rewriting
• availability and recency biases skew risk and performance
• stereotypes and false priors shortcut people into boxes
• binary bias flattens nuance into all‑or‑nothing
• in‑group bias and the pull of tribal loyalty
• bandwagon bias and social proof over logic
• authority bias and status signals overriding doubt
• loss aversion, status quo bias, and the endowment effect
• sunk cost fallacy and how to exit cleanly
• survivorship bias and base rates for realism
• framing effect and how language steers judgment
• practical tools: name the bias, add context, choose future‑first
Subscribe and share this podcast with them
If you enjoyed these episodes, please share it with a friend
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out on more Sage advice
We would love to hear your feedback! Click here to tell us what you think.
https://sagesolutions.buzzsprout.com
If you are interested in one-on-one coaching, email us at:
sagecoachingsolutions@gmail.com
**Legal Disclaimer**
The Sage Solutions Podcast and content posted by David Sage is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. No coaching client relationship is formed by listening to this podcast. No Legal, Medical or Financial advice is being given. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast or website is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice, diagnosis, or treatment of a psychotherapist, physician, professional coach, Lawyer or other qualified professional. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The opinions of guests are their own and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of the podcast.
Welcome to the Sage Solutions podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage, and I am a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions. If you were with us in the last episode, you know we started a very specific, slightly uncomfortable journey. We began the process of popping the hood on the human brain to take a look at the engine. We talked about how our minds aren't these perfect logical supercomputers that we wish they were. They are messy, they are emotional, and they are full of what we call cognitive biases. Now, on record, there are over a hundred recorded cognitive biases. Some of them are incredibly niche. So in these two-part episodes, I'm trying to cover the ones just the most important ones, the ones that have the biggest impact on the way that you think in your daily life. Last time we talked about how we trick ourselves, how we filter reality to confirm what we already believe with the confirmation bias. And how after gaining just a little bit of understanding, we tend to think that we're smarter than we are with the Dun and Krueger effect. But today, today is part two. And if I had to give a broad summary, if part one was more about how you view yourself, part two is largely about how you view the world and the people in it. We have 17, yes, 17 more mental traps to cover today. We are going to talk about why you cling to bad subscriptions, why we trust people of authority without question, and why losing$20 hurts twice as much as finding$20 on the ground feels good. Everyone has these cognitive biases. They are built into or hardwired into the way that we think. Because from an evolutionary standpoint, and by that I just mean survival of the fittest, each and every one of them served a purpose, a purpose that helped keep us alive, fed, safe, and having children. The goal here isn't to make you feel defective. It's the opposite. It's to give you the manual. You can't fix a machine if you don't know how it breaks. So join me. Get uncomfortable. And let's get back into the built-in glitches in our operating system. But before we get into it, our goal with this podcast is to share free, helpful tools with you and anyone you know who is looking to improve their life. So take action. Subscribe and share this podcast with them. Now I know I said this was largely about how we view others, but there are still several cognitive biases that we haven't covered that apply to how we view ourselves. So I'm gonna start with the me filter. We all think that we are humble, observant people, but biologically, from your point of view, you are the protagonist of your own movie. The camera is always on you in a first person perspective. This leads to the egocentric bias. Don't confuse the fact that we all have the egocentric bias with being a narcissist. They are different. Egocentric bias is simply the inability to fully untangle your own perspective from reality. We touched on this in the last episode. It's when you overestimate how much people are noticing you. You spill coffee on your shirt, and you think everyone in the office is staring at it. In reality, people barely care. They're too busy worrying about the coffee stain on their shirt and assuming the exact same things. We subconsciously assume that our internal world is visible to external reality. And this bleeds right into the self-serving bias. This is one of my favorites because we all do it. So here's the formula. If I succeed, it's because of my skill, my hard work, my natural talent, and my brilliance. But if I fail, it must be because I just had bad luck or somebody else screwed me over, maybe the economy or the referee. Think about it. When you cut somebody off in traffic, it's because you're late for a very important meeting. You wouldn't have done it if you didn't have a good reason. It's situational. At least hopefully that's your reason. But when someone cuts you off, we immediately assume it's because they are a jerk. It's their character, it's just who they are. This is the self-serving bias, protecting your self-esteem. The part that's about ourselves is the self-serving bias. The flip side that we attribute to others has its own term called the fundamental attribution error, often called the empathy killer. It's the tendency to believe that what other people do reflects who they are rather than the situation that they are in. If the waiter is rude, we assume that he is a bad waiter or a mean person. But we fail to consider that he might have just gotten yelled at by his boss, and maybe he didn't deserve to be yelled at in that situation. Now if it was us, we would be taking that into consideration, but we fail to consider that for others. Opening up these two biases is huge for conflict resolution. This flows directly into the next bias that we're going to talk about. So let's look at how we judge others through this lens. We have what's called the halo effect. This is where we take this is generally where we take one positive trait about a person and we let it bleed into everything else. For instance, we see someone who is physically attractive, or maybe very tall, or smart, and we subconsciously assume that they are also kind, smart, and a good leader. We see this in hiring all the time. A candidate walks in, they are well dressed and charming. That's the halo. So we ignore the fact that they don't actually have the skills for the job. We assume they do because of their other positive attribute. We let the halo blind us to the details. But this can have a blinding rebound effect. If there is a particularly negative or annoying trait that we notice right away, the halo effect being one of the main reasons why first impressions make such a big difference. While a positive halo effect can lead to an upward spiral and over projection of positive traits onto someone, the same but opposite is true of a negative halo effect. A bad first impression that shows a negative trait can start a downward spiral and project many other negative traits onto that person. And the final bias in this group we have is the hindsight bias. This is the I knew it all along effect. You watch a sporting event. Your team loses. Immediately you say, I knew they were going to lose. I could just feel it. No, you didn't. You were hoping that they would win. In fact, at the start of the game, you're like, we got this one. But once the event happens, your brain rewrites your memory to make you look like a prophet. We do this to make the world feel more predictable, to give ourselves more confidence, so that we can take action when we need to. If we knew it all along, then the world doesn't seem quite so scary and random. But unfortunately, but unfortunately, most of the time, it's a lie that we tell ourselves. So ask yourself, where are you rewriting history to make yourself look smarter than you were? Where are you using the self-serving bias or the halo effect in your life? Alright, we're going to move on to the second cluster, which I'm going to call the lazy brain. Now your brain isn't actually that lazy. It burns about 20% of your body's calories. In fact, it's kind of an energy hog. So whenever it can take a shortcut to save energy, it will. And the biggest shortcut that we take is the availability bias. This is the tendency to judge the probability of an event based on how easily an example comes to mind. If I ask you, is the world more dangerous today than 100 years ago? Most people say yes. Why? Because you saw a crime on the news this morning. It is available to your memory. And because over time information has become much more available, especially negative information because that's what gets views and news stations know this because of our negativity bias, we see it more and more. Not to mention the echo chambers of social media. Because it is available to your memory, you don't see the millions of people who didn't get robbed today. You just remember that readily available story from the news. When in the past, violence and violent crimes were much, much higher. Another example is that people are terrified of shark attacks, because they are both memorable and available in movies and media, but they aren't afraid of vending machines, which statistically kill more people per year by falling on them than sharks do by eating people. Similar to this is the recency bias. We give way more weight to the most recent information. If an employee does a great job for 11 months but messes up in December, guess what their performance review looks like in January? It looks like the mistake. We forget the history because the recent data is so much louder. And oftentimes more available. Now let's get into something a little bit stickier. False priors, which is a fancy term for stereotypes. This is what most people think of when they hear the word bias. Now we can be biased in lots of different ways based on our experiences, based on our upbringing. But oftentimes when bias is talked about, it's in the context of our unconscious biases towards groups of people and the stereotypes that we hold about them. This is the ultimate lazy brain move. Instead of evaluating a person as a complex individual, the brain says, Oh, I recognize this pattern. This person is X, so they must be Y. We use our past experiences, or priors, to predict the future. If you were bitten by a dog once, your brain creates a false prior that all dogs are dangerous. It saves processing power, but it destroys our ability to see reality and people for who they are. It destroys our ability to evaluate each individual on a case-by-case basis. And the compounding of this societally causes commonly held stereotypes and can even lead to things oppression, racism, sexism, and many other problems that we've dealt with throughout history. So the final of our lazy biases is the binary bias. Now, if you've listened to this podcast, you've heard me rant about this one. The binary bias is actually one of my personal pet peeves. And it's because it is the polar opposite view of a major part of one of my core fundamentals. Lifelong learning in shades of gray through curiosity and critical thinking. Well the binary bias is none of that. It's quickly labeling things as good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, pretty or ugly, smart or stupid, and on and on and on. Complexity can be hard. Nuance takes calories. So we flatten the world into two choices. You're either with us or you're against us. That food is either a superfood or it's a poison. But real wisdom is usually found in shades of grey, not the binary. But unfortunately, the binary is easier and tends to feel safer. Okay, we are now a good chunk through. Take a deep breath. Let's talk about why you act the way you do in groups. We are social primates. We are terrified of being kicked out of the tribe. This drives the in group bias, which is really simple tribalism. We give preferential treatment to those we perceive as being in our group, and we are suspicious of those who are outside our group. This isn't just about race or religion or sex. It happens with sports teams. It happens with iPhone users versus Android users. Oh he's a Packers fan? He must be a good guy. We lower the bar for our tribe and raise the bar for everyone else. So this directly connects to the next one. The bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is if everyone else is doing it, it must be right. You walk past two restaurants. One is empty, one has a line out the door. Which one do you want to go to? The one with the line. Even though the one without a line will not have any weight, and you will probably get a less busy server and better service, while the one with the line you will have to wait to be seated, and it will likely be busy, causing a less great experience. This is because social proof is a powerful drug. It overrides your own logic. You might not even like that restaurant, but your brain assumes the crowd knows something you don't. Now when it comes to a restaurant, they might be right. I'm not saying that social proof doesn't hold any weight. I'm just arguing that it's not proof, and there are many times where where we do things just because the rest of society is doing things. Even if there's no real weight to it. That's right. I'm looking at you six seven. Alright, moving on. And then there is the authority bias. This one is kinda scary. It is our tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure, and be more influenced by that opinion. If someone wears a white lab coat or a police uniform, or even just a really expensive suit, we often shut off our critical thinking. There was a famously eerie experiment, the Milgram experiment, where people were willing to shock others just because a man in a lab coat told them to. We have to be careful here not to fall into this bias. Because the effects can be terrible. Just because someone has a title doesn't mean that they have the truth. We're all human and we all make mistakes. Remember, everyone, including authority figures, has all of these biases as well. So think about your own life. Who are you following just because everyone else is? That's the bandwagon effect. Who are you listening to just because they look important? That's the authority bias. Moving on to our second last cluster of biases. These are the three that keep you stuck in a life that you don't love. The first is loss aversion. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tvarsky found that the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. You will work harder to keep$100 than you will to earn$100. This bias leads us to play small. We don't apply for the new job because we're afraid of losing the security of the old one. We don't start the business because we are afraid of losing our savings. We prioritize safety over growth every single time unless we consciously fight it. The cousin of loss aversion is the status quo bias. This is the preference for things to stay exactly the same. Change requires effort. Change requires risk. So if we have a choice, we usually choose doing nothing, not changing. This is why you stay with the same insurance company, even though they keep raising your rates. This is why you stay in a relationship that has been dead for two years. Because doing something feels risky. Doing nothing feels safe. But in the long run, the status quo is often the most dangerous place to be. Rounding out this trio, we have the endowment effect, also called the clutter trap. What is it? It's the tendency to value something more highly simply because you own it. This is one of the main reasons why it's so hard to declutter your house. You think your old mug is worth$10 because it's yours, but if you saw it in a store, you might pay a dollar for it. And you know what? Heck, I'm gonna throw another one in. While this one is technically a logical fallacy, depending on who you ask, it also counts as a cognitive bias. The sunk cost fallacy. The past investment trap. The tendency to continue doing something just because you've already invested money, effort, or time into it, even if the current costs outweigh the benefits. Staying in a bad career because I spent four years in college for this, or finishing a terrible book just because you read the first fifty pages, or staying in a relationship that neither of you have been happy for years and years simply because of how long you've been in it. The sunk cost fallacy compounds on these other biases by adding the time, money, or effort investment on top. Okay, we're rounding the home stretch here. I only have two biases left, and they're in a category I'm just gonna call miscellaneous. The first is the survivorship bias. Focusing on the people or things that survived a process and overlooking those that don't. This is the survivorship bias. I'll give you an example. We look at college dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and we think, wow, look at them, they're successful. Dropping out is good for business. But we ignore the thousands of dropouts who are broke, struggling, and still have debt. We only look at the winners, and this distorts our view of what it really takes to succeed. And finally, we have the framing effect. This is very similar, but different, to what we talked about in the episode about framing. The context which we talked about framing was using different mental frames to change your conscious perspective of reality, because there are many ways to interpret reality. The framing effect is more about how the framing in which other people relay information to you changes the perspective that you have on it. It's sort of a reversal of it. It's the same with how you portray information to others. The framing effect is drawing different conclusions from the same information depending on how that information is being presented. You tend to accept their frame. You feel better buying meat that is 90% fat-free than you would if the meat said 10% fat. Even though they're literally the same thing. This can be used for good or for bad. How you frame your own life problems determines how you solve them. But the way that other people frame things to you often determines the automatic frame that you use. So be aware. Okay, that was a lot of biases. I get it. It felt like a bit of a marathon. Especially between this episode and the last one. But we have covered just shy of 30 different ways that your brain lies to you. We talked about ego-related biases, like the self-serving bias. We've talked about how it affects your memory with the recency and availability bias. We covered the effect of the tribe with bandwagon effect and the authority bias. We also covered a bias of fear with loss aversion. So what do we do with all this? It can feel kind of overwhelming. So here it is. Start with acceptance. Don't beat yourself up for having these hardwired biases. Accept that they're going to happen and that it's okay to be human. And then we move to where our agency is. In shades of gray, in taking control of our conscious perspective, in awareness, curiosity, and focusing on our locus of control. Because you are now aware of all of these different biases, you can approach your own brain with curiosity. You can notice when they're happening, and take control of your agency, your locus of control to redirect your perspective of reality to a more objective way of looking at it. So remember curiosity over certainty, cognitive biases thrive on certainty. They thrive on making you think I know the truth. I know what happened, I know who they are, but life is rarely that black and white. It operates primarily in shades of gray. To hack these biases, you have to get curious. When you feel absolutely sure about something, ask yourself, wait, is this just availability bias or binary bias? When you're terrified to make a change, ask is this just loss aversion or status quo bias? When you judge someone instantly, you can ask, am I stereotyping them? Or is this even the halo effect? You will never fully get rid of these. Like I said, they are hardwired into our brains. But if you can spot them, you can stop them from driving the car. You can put them in the back seat. I really appreciate you sticking with it and listening to this deep dive. This is not a topic that's often covered in personal development, but I really do believe that it's incredibly important, and that having this awareness makes a huge difference in your life. This is the heavy lifting of personal development. It's not just positive affirmations, it's debugging the code. If you enjoyed these episodes, please share it with a friend. Break your in-group bias and invite somebody new into our circle. And remember, you are enough, and you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence, and resilience. Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions podcast. Your time is valuable, and I'm so glad you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more Sage advice. One last thing. The League Language. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching client relationship is formed. It is not intended as a substitute for the personalized advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.