We innovated a new cognitive bias
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I always thought cognitive biases were a set of static things, but it turns out we can actually recombine them in different ways to make news ones. One I’ve just learned about is called “narrative bias”, and it describes the ways in which a single narrative or story can change the way we see information. There are two ways this can manifest.
The first is when a single story or anecdote overrides all the other data you have. The common example here is something like, I know doctors say to avoid smoking but my friend smokes every day and is the healthiest person I know so I don’t think smoking is unhealthy. To give an example from tech, this is like when a product leader ignores all the data from their team because their kid tried to use the product and their kid had an opinion that was different.
The second way narrative bias shows up is when you take a bunch of fairly unrelated anecdotes and form a cohesive story out of them. The common example is conspiracy theories, but I’ll give an example from tech: this is like when a product area is actually failing but the team hides it by pulling a subset of unrelated data that together implies that things are going well, or that things are going to turn around.
Now “narrative bias” is itself a new term, but I’ll share one more related, new-to-me term. This is the “misinformation effect,” coined in the 1970s by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. The misinformation effect is when words or images get presented to you that change your perception of things that happened in the past. For example, someone witnesses a car crash; if afterwards the crash is described to them as the cars “collided”, they’ll remember the speed as being slower, but if the crash is described as cars “smashing into each other” they’ll actually remember the speed as being faster. An example from tech could be what I described in a previous episode called “AI has main character energy.”
The takeaway here is that our brains can get hijacked in a million different ways, and it’s easy to see it happening to other people but seeing it in our own lives is much harder. Learning and sharing what it looks like means we can at least try to spot it and fight it. Thanks for listening.