We often mistakenly believe that achieving our goals will make us happy.  Whether you're aiming to run a marathon, get a work promotion or buy your first house, when meeting the goal, you will initially feel delighted, but soon after, you find yourself back at your usual level of happiness or even have a feeling of emptiness.  The disappointment of experiencing the expected happiness only briefly can impact your well-being. Instead, it's important to reframe our goals so you can avoid the anti-climax.

“When I achieve this goal, then I will be happy” 

Our ability to imagine how something will make us feel is often flawed because of the impact bias.  The impact bias leads us to overestimate the positive impact the accomplishment of a goal will have and underestimate how other events or feelings may influence the way we feel. After reaching a goal, you'll be happy for a short while, but despite reaching your goal, another goal will appear, and you'll assume that achieving the next goal will lead to more happiness. Yet, the list of goals is never completed.

The short-lived nature of goal-based happiness

The arrival fallacy affects us in multiple ways by influencing future decision-making and emotional well-being. For instance, if the initial thrill of finishing a marathon fades after two days and leaves you feeling empty, you may conclude that aiming to excel is not worth the hardship. Or, you may immediately start exploring new challenges to reach that short-lived peak of happiness again.

The impact of the arrival fallacy

You can't reach happiness after achieving a goal. Achieving a goal may give you a short-term boost, but your levels of happiness will continue to rise and fall according to the internal and external events you experience. Everyone falls prey to this fallacy, from ordinary individuals to highly-educated people.

Happiness is not a static destination

The key is to repackage your motivation to change your perspective, making the process of achieving your goals as important as a result. <ul><li>Avoid when/then happiness projections. Instead of thinking, “I will be happy when I...", practice mindfulness and take note of what currently makes you happy.</li><li>Focus on the journey, not the outcome. Enjoy the process so that you are not only hoping for joy at the finishing point. This way, regardless of the product, the journey will have been worth the work.</li><li>Celebrate minor milestones.</li></ul>

How to avoid the arrival fallacy

When we tie our happiness to the achievement of a goal, we fall prey to the arrival fallacy.

“When I achieve this goal, then I will be happy.” We often mistakenly believe that achieving our goals will make us happy. That tendency is called the arrival fallacy.

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The arrival fallacy: why we should decouple our happiness from our goals

As humans, our ability to make the right decisions is limited by the many constraints of our minds. One such constraint is the availability bias — our tendency to make judgments based on previous experiences that are easily recalled. When some piece of information is quickly brought to mind, we incorrectly assume that it’s an accurate reflection of reality.This <a href="https://nesslabs.com/tag/cognitive-biases">cognitive bias</a> often leads to the illusion of rational thinking and, ultimately, to bad decisions.

What We Easily Recall, We Believe

In 1955, Dr Herbert Simon formulated the notion that memory limitations can affect decision-making. Simon further elaborated that it’s not possible for humans to consider every piece of relevant information. Instead, we focus on the data within our minds that’s readily available and thus seems to be the most pertinent.Simon’s research opened the door to the modern examination of decision-making processes, and the shortcuts we utilise to reach conclusions.

The History Of Availability Bias

There is a natural human tendency to assume that examples we can readily think of are more relevant than they truly are.For example, if you’re looking for a new note-taking app, you might go for a particular tool because you recall that a friend recently raved about it. Or, if you read about a plane crash in the news a week before you are due to fly for work, you may overestimate the likelihood of your own plane crashing.

Demonstrating Availability Bias

Availability is an ecologically valid clue for the judgement of frequency because, in general, frequent events are easier to recall or imagine than infrequent ones.However, availability is also affected by various factors which are unrelated to actual frequency. If the availability heuristic is applied, then such factors will affect the perceived frequency of classes and the subjective probability of events.Consequently, the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.

Frequent Events Are On Top Of Mind

Availability bias can also influence consumer’s beliefs about perceived risk. Availability bias can also impact self-evaluation.Even doctors can misdiagnose patients as a result of the availability bias. A recent experience of a health condition makes it easier to recall and therefore increases the chance that a subsequent patient might be misdiagnosed with the same illness.

Availability Bias Is Everywhere

Instead of going for the most obvious solution, which is likely to be heavily influenced by your most recent experiences, conduct research and generate as many potential solutions as possible based on factual data. You can practise deliberate <a href="https://nesslabs.com/brainstorming">brainstorming</a> on your own or with your team. This not only helps to manage availability bias, but may also lead to the generation of innovative solutions that you may not otherwise have considered.

How to Manage the Availability Bias: Deliberate Brainstorming

Red teaming is similar to playing devil’s advocate. It involves rigorously challenging ideas and assessing ideas from an opposing point of view to discover flaws or shortcomings. The aim is to avoid making unsound decisions and mitigate potential adverse events. As part of red teaming ideas, decision-makers should explore alternative solutions, interrogate the underlying facts, and try to view the decision from an impartial point of view to thoroughly test the integrity of a decision.

Try “Red Teaming” Ideas.

Self-reflection can take the form of journaling, talking out loud to yourself, or thinking deeply about a decision while <a href="https://nesslabs.com/focused-mind">away from distractions</a> — for example while taking a walk. Taking time to reflect on decisions prior to executing them allows for a delay that will reduce the power of the availability bias, so that other ideas have the necessary space to surface.

Self Reflection

While the mind’s shortcuts make decision-making quicker and easier, they can lead to less-than-ideal solutions. As you have seen, the availability bias may lead to poor personal and professional decisions. While it’s impossible for this cognitive bias to be completely overridden, you can avoid some of its most negative effects by brainstorming, red teaming ideas, and implementing a self-reflection practice. These strategies will help you take a more objective view of the information available to you.

The Bottom Line

As humans, our ability to make the right decisions is limited by the many constraints of our mind. One such constraint is the availability bias, our tendency to make judgments based on previous experiences that are easily recalled.

Availability bias: the tendency to use information that easily comes to mind

Have you felt sometimes that most of your friends are travelling around beautiful places and having a good time while you are struggling in a city managing work and home? Or you might feel that everyone in your age group has got married and settled down and you are still searching for a partner and nothing is working!! Why am I single while everyone else is married and possibly living happily ever after? This might be a Majority illusion.

Everyone Else Is Married And I Am Still Single!

The “majority illusion” suggests that under some conditions, individuals will overestimate the prevalence of some behaviours or the absence of a behaviour or certain attributes. Let's say people might feel everyone is leaving the company and joining a start-up, or there is no empowerment in the organization. While this could be just an illusion when we dig deeper. If people who have "felt" attrition is high or there is no empowerment, they will respond like that to a perception-based survey. And most of the surveys we do in organizations are perception based.

Defining The Majority Illusion

The phenomenon called majority illusion can influence the way we answer a perception-based survey on Engagement or culture.The majority illusion happens when few people who are highly connected in the network demonstrate certain behaviours even though these behaviours are relatively rare in the larger organisation.This is because the high-degree nodes(people who are connected to others most), or hubs of a social network, present such behaviours to a lot of different people, creating a skewed perception of the behaviour’s popularity in the network.

The Cause Of Majority Illusion

The red nodes have the capacity to create a majority illusion as they are highly connected in their network and others might perceive reality based on their experience with "just" these three people.

The Majority Illusion Diagram

Have you felt sometimes that most of your friends are travelling around beautiful places like Goa or in the hills and having a good time while you are ... 49 comments on LinkedIn

The Majority Illusion

<ul><li>Rationality is a tool for achieving a goal.</li><li>Rationality aids in the decision-making process.</li><li>Ignorance and self-restraint are both viable options.</li><li>Science is the application of logic to the real world.</li><li>We become less partial — and more sensible – as a result of institutions.</li><li>People are punished for their own good, which leads to a more rational commons.</li><li>Because it is rational, our most important moral principle is powerful.</li></ul>

Rationality: What Sets Humans Apart From Other Species

The definition of rational, according to dictionaries, is "having a reason." And the term reason derives from the Latin word ratio, which means "reason."Rationality, according to philosophers, is the ability to use information to achieve goals. The term "knowledge" refers to true beliefs that are supported by evidence. We wouldn't consider someone rational if they acted on incorrect beliefs.But rationality entails more than just believing correct thoughts like "1 Plus 1 = 2." It also facilitates our tasks.

Rationality Is a Tool for Achieving a Goal

When one path is blocked, we may always attempt another. This is human rationality in action.Reason is a tool for achieving a goal. Passions are the source of goals. That is, feelings such as love, rage, pride, envy, and fear stem from desires, drives, and emotions like love, anger, pride, envy, and fear. Reason, therefore, is the "slave of the passions."Reason alone cannot tell us which goals to pursue. They're neither rational nor irrational in a logical sense - they're arational.However, there are instances when we must choose between competing objectives. That's when logic comes into play.

Rationality Is Merely a Means to An Aim

The conjunction fallacy occurs when a person assumes that specific conditions are more likely than a single general one. ‍What are people thinking? A class of events described by a single statement can be generic and abstract, with nothing for the mind to hold on to. A class of events described by a conjunction of statements can be more vivid, especially when they spell out a storyline we can watch in the theatre of our imagination. Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems.

The Conjunction Fallacy

The availability heuristic is a method of making decisions based on familiar facts - anything that has left a lasting impression on our minds.There is too much information circulating in society to evaluate the truth of each point or lack thereof. To combat this, we create mental shortcuts. When we are presented with new information, we make a quick inventory of our current beliefs in order to form an initial assessment of the material’s veracity.

The Availability Heuristic

The media has amplified our irrational judgments. One classic example is the safety of flying versus driving.The world’s roads account for 1.3 million fatal accidents each year, while plane crashes kill 250 people. We hear about the single plane crash of the year, but not about the 364 days of safe air travel. If news outlets used the same approach with cars, they would have to run the headline, “35,000 dead in road accidents yesterday,” every single day.

Our Judgements Are Mostly Irrational

Bayes’ rule or Bayes’ Theorem is the law of probability governing the strength of evidence—the rule saying how much to revise our probabilities (change our minds) when we learn a new fact or observe new evidence.Probabilistic thinking means avoiding absolutes. When we express the likelihood of our beliefs, we open the door to further discussions. Rather than expressing things in black and white terms, as true or false, try saying: ‘I’m an 80 on that’, or ‘I’m only a 25 on that’. As a result, we remain receptive to new evidence while gathering information to guide future truth-seeking efforts.

Bayesian Reasoning: Probabilistic Thinking

Knowing something does not imply that you will act rationally on it.Willpower isn't always up to the challenge of resisting temptation.Preventing yourself from acting on temptation is one approach to fighting it.If you go shopping after you've eaten, for example, it's much easier to resist the siren melodies of unhealthy treats. Similarly, if you've advised your company to set aside a portion of your paycheck for retirement, you can't spend money you know you should be saving.

Ignorance and Self-Restraint Are Both Viable Options

Selective ignorance can also be used to combat bias. That is why jury members are not allowed to see inadmissible evidence obtained through coercion or hearsay.Good scientists also protect their work from bias by performing double-blind studies in which they are unaware of which patients received medicine and which received a placebo. In both circumstances, ignorance aids in maintaining objectivity.

Ignorance To Combat Bias

Motivated reasoning describes how we let our beliefs mold our perception of the world, ensuring that we see things as we are, not as they are.When we add a belief to our arsenal, evidence for why it’s true begins compounding. Even if provided with proof that disproves these beliefs, we will interpret such evidence in ways that support our currently held narratives.The human brain is not a level playing field for rational decision-making. The myth that we are reasonable creatures stems from the incorrect assumption that our brains are, by default, instruments of logic.

Motivated Reasoning

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

Confirmation bias causes us to focus on the information that reinforces our beliefs while ignoring or distorting disconfirming evidence. Part of this reasoning is our tendency to treat ideas like possessions, things we wish to retain at all costs.People are often more concerned with winning an argument than discovering the truth. Truth-seeking has become a competition that rewards dogmatic beliefs and outlaws open-mindedness. This has given rise to the social notion that changing our minds is a sign of weakness. When, in fact,  it is a sign of substantial intellectual strength.

Confirmation Bias

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

According to the bandwagon fallacy, something is true simply because it is popular; therefore, the popularity of something validates its truth.Product advertisers use this ploy every time they use phrases like “most popular,” despite the fact that the popularity of a product is irrelevant to its merits

The Bandwagon Fallacy

The genetic fallacy describes accepting a claim as true or false solely based on its origin. An idea's source doesn’t validate or invalidate its claim to truth, yet it is one of the most prevalent fallacies you will encounter in the 21st century.

The Genetic Fallacy

In literary criticism, the affective fallacy refers to evaluating works based on the effect they have on the reader, who is free to reject anything deemed harmful, hurtful, or uncomfortable. The opposite is equally true. Although often described as a literary criticism term, the fallacy applies to any case where someone judges the validity of a message solely on its emotional impact.

The Affective Fallacy

Myopic discounting is the reversal of preference based on the distance to the reward. Its name derives from myopia, which means a lack of discernment or foreseeing. The preference reversal is called myopic, or nearsighted, because we see an attractive temptation that is near to us in time all too clearly, while the faraway choices are emotionally blurred and (a bit contrary to the ophthalmological metaphor) we judge them more objectively.

Myopic Discounting 

Hyperbolic discounting is closely related to myopic discounting and points out our tendency to choose immediate rewards over future ones, even when the immediate rewards are smaller. Succumbing to this tendency results in poor decision-making because it promotes impulsivity and immediate gratification, behaviours that prioritize short-term enjoyment over long-term wellbeing.

Hyperbolic Discounting

When someone makes a claim to promote an emotional response rather than provide relevant facts to support their argument, they commit the appeal to emotion fallacy.While arguments often contain emotional components, the appeal to emotion fallacy occurs when a person uses emotion to manipulate and hide the fact that they cannot offer a rational counterargument.

Appeal To Emotion Fallacy

When we pass judgment on someone simply because they are associated with someone we already have an opinion about, this is known as the guilty by association, or association fallacy.If there is a particular podcast host we dislike because of their terrible takes, every guest of theirs may leave a sour impression in our minds. When we next see the guest's name appear online, we will interpret everything they say in a negative light due to the traces the negative association has left in our minds (availability bias).

Guilty by Association

Biases distort our cognitive system and prevent us from making rational decisions. The myth that we are reasonable creatures stems from the incorrect assumption that our brains are, by default, instruments of logic. Through analyzing the most common cognitive fallacies, we’re taken on a journey through the mechanics of the mind towards the root of our irrationality, which the author argues is due to motives shaping our judgment.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 'Punchy, funny and invigorating ... Pinker is the high priest of rationalism' Sunday Times 'If you've ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead. It's cheaper, more entertaining, and more effective' Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing? In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now. Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower. 'A terrific book, much-needed for our time' Peter Singer

Rationality

The thinking mind is the part of the mind that tries to make sense of the world by analysing situations, imagining scenarios, and telling stories. But it is limited by several cognitive bottlenecks, such as how much information we can process at one time, how many tasks we can focus on simultaneously, and how many parameters we can consider when making decisions.

The thinking mind

Our limited sensory capabilities mean that we tend to overestimate our cognitive ability. We try to simultaneously process multiple streams of information or work on several tasks at the same time. So we respond by multitasking. We believe we will be quicker by combining two tasks. We also trust we can consider many different facts when making complex decisions. But our thinking mind is limited by two bottlenecks: attention and working memory.

Intrinsic limitations of the thinking mind

<ul><li>Attention: Research shows that we're bad at dividing our attention between different tasks.</li><li>Working memory allows us to hold multiple bits of information for the short term. This is important for activities such as reading, writing, having a conversation, and making decisions. But the working memory is a bottleneck as it is limited in capacity and duration. </li></ul> Every person will have different levels of attention and working memory, which will vary throughout the day and years. Being aware of these cognitive bottlenecks can help you to avoid being overconfident and make better decisions.

Two bottlenecks: Attention and working memory

<ul><li>Offload some of your thinking. Instead of relying on your mind alone, use tools for thought that help you collect and connect ideas together.</li><li>Plan for focused chunks of work. Instead of multitasking, define your tasks and block time to complete them.</li><li>Practice mindful productivity. Instead of blaming yourself for getting distracted, gently bring back your attention to your tasks.</li></ul>

How to manage your cognitive bottlenecks

Cognitive bottlenecks limit how much information we can process at one time, how many tasks we can simultaneously focus on, and how many parameters we can consider while making a decision.

The arrival fallacy: why we should decouple our happiness from our goals

Availability bias: the tendency to use information that easily comes to mind

The Majority Illusion

Rationality

Cognitive bottlenecks: the inherent limits of the thinking mind

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