Cognitive Dissonance And Bias

Suggests that holding 2 or more contradictory beliefs at the same time causes people to experience mental discomfort, which manifests as psychological stress. 

And people will always seek to minimize their cognitive dissonance and the discomfort it creates.

The Benjamin Franklin effect has generally been explained using cognitive dissonance theory.

Essentially, this means that when someone does you a favor, they need to be able to justify it to themself, in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that might occur from doing something nice for someone that they dislike.

• Research shows that being kind to someone increases how much you like that person.
• Being asked a favor can make one feel acknowledged for their expertise, which can cause them to develop more positive feelings toward the person asking for help.
• The negative Benjamin Franklin effect happens when people who do something negative to someone will increase the degree to which they dislike that person, in order to justify their negative actions to themselves.

A psychological phenomenon that causes people to like someone more after they do them a favor, especially if they dislike the helped person. 

You can use it to benefit and protect yourself when interacting with others.

A person who voluntarily does you a favor is more likely to do you another favor than if they had received a favor from you. 

It means that you grow to like people for whom you do favors for and dislike people you harm.

This is the fear of losing any part of our bodily structure or the thought of having our body's boundaries invaded.

Anxiety about animals, such as bugs, spiders, snakes, and other creepy things arises from fear of mutilation.

The fear of being immobilized, restricted, overwhelmed, entrapped, smothered, or otherwise controlled by circumstances beyond our control. 

Fear of intimacy, or "fear of commitment," is basically fear of losing one's autonomy.

• Humorous information receives increased attention during the perception stage.
• Improved encoding. Our brain gives preferential treatment to humorous information when it comes to storing it in our memory.
• The use of humor serves as a distraction from negative emotions, such as anger or anxiety, that people might experience when processing certain information.
• Reading or viewing something humorous has a positive and energizing effect.
• Adding humor to the information that you are presenting can make it more interesting to others.

The use of positive, nonaggressive humor is associated with 

• improved learning outcomes, 
• a relaxed learning environment, 
• better student evaluations, 
• an increased motivation to learn, 
• improved information recall, 
• an increased degree of student satisfaction throughout the learning process.

The use of negative or aggressive humor, especially if aimed at particular students, will produce the opposite effect.

Don’t create unnecessary conflict with your co-workers, but don’t run from it, either. See it as an opportunity to better understand someone you’ll be spending 40 hours a week around. 

Chances are, the other person will respond the same way. Goodwill is taken for granted less often than you might think.

At first, asking for help might sound like the opposite of creating your own opportunities. 

Opportunities are tied to personal relationships. Consider the Ben Franklin effect: By asking someone for a small favor, you endear them to yourself. The reason is that, when you help someone, your brain rationalizes your actions by assuming that you must like that person.

These explanations are all irrational for preferring the status quo:

• Loss Aversion: When we make decisions, we weigh the potential for loss more heavily than the potential for gain.
• Sunk Costs: We continue to invest resources like time, money, or effort into a specific endeavor just because we are already invested, not because it is the best choice.
• Cognitive Dissonance: In decision-making, we an option as more valuable once we have chosen it. Considering an alternative can cause cognitive dissonance.
• Mere Exposure Effect: It states that people prefer something they've been exposed to before.
• Rationality vs. Irrationality: We may choose to keep our current situation because of the potential transition cost of switching to an alternative. It becomes irrational when we ignore choices that can improve a situation because we want to maintain the status quo.

• When offered several sandwich options, individuals often choose a sandwich they have eaten before.
• In 1985, Coca Cola reformulated the original Coke flavor and started selling a "New Coke." Although blind taste tests found many consumers preferred New Coke, consumers continued to buy Coke Classic. New Coke was discontinued in 1992.
• In political elections, the current candidate is more likely to win than the challenger.

When we don't understand the details, it can cause much trouble. If a nation is overconfident that they will win a war, they will fight more wars. An investor that is to sure of their estimate of an asset's value will trade too much.

The world is too big to process and understand everything. We have to oversimplify the world to be able to function in it. The difficulty is that we don't think our models of how the world works are oversimplified. We believe they are correct. This creates a hidden risk.

Focusing on specific details in a complex system while ignoring the amount of detail contained within the system may at first show a benefit. However, it can create a massive collapse in the long-run.

In the late 18th century, the German government wanted to grow "scientific forests" to track and harvest timber. Underbrush was cleared, and tree species reduced. The first planting did well because of nutrients that were still left in the soil. But the clearing of underbrush reduced insect, mammal, and bird populations essential to soil building. Pests had few enemies left and infected the entire forest, resulting in massive forest death across the country.