6 ms·

Becoming better or more successful by reading about biases seems difficult. After reading Kahneman, Ariely, and others, I've sort of come to the conclusion that

by hedgew 12y ago

Becoming better or more successful by reading about biases seems difficult. After reading Kahneman, Ariely, and others, I've sort of come to the conclusion that a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases. These people gain a slight edge (or many) in life. However, learning to avoid or exploit biases is very difficult - unless you just have the kind of personality that already benefits from many biases. For example, Steve Jobs could be thought of as having a personality which benefits from many biases. A few that I remember instantly: overconfidence bias (others believe you more if you're confident) and halo effect (one positive thing, like good looks, makes people think that you're good in other things too). Probably many others. Any one of these alone - probably wouldn't result in much. He hit a delicate balance, and his personality just worked out. He probably didn't know anything about bias research, and emulating the success of his personality by studying biases would be nigh impossible. Of course, biases aren't the sole reason for his success, but can explain parts of his life, and how he influenced people. So studying biases helps us a little. You learn to understand human behavior a little better. You can maybe fine-tune some parts of your personality. Most stereotypical geeks for example, probably don't act confidently enough. But changing your behavior radically to avoid or exploit biases is still very difficult.

fludlight 12y ago
> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases...However, learning to avoid or exploit biases is very difficult You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. As the founder of Spanx said "hire your weaknesses" [1]. [1] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/interview-how-spanx-became-billion-dollar-undergarment-empire http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/int...
- lsc 12y ago
  >You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. This is easier for some specialties than others. For example, if you want to hire someone who is good at negotiation, if they are actually good at negotiation, they should be able to extract as compensation the majority of the value they add. If you are especially bad at negotiation, or if it's difficult to tell exactly how much value they are adding, it's possible for them to extract more value as compensation than they are adding to the transaction.
  - eru 12y ago
    That's why you need to multiple people who are good at negotiation to compete with each other for your bid.
    - lsc 12y ago
      That is, of course, a great idea if you can make it work. However, for that to work, you need to have a well-delineated task; you need all your bidders to be bidding on the same thing. Let us take the very simple case of real-estate. "Sell my house, you get 3% of the total selling price." (well, traditionally, the seller pays 6%, but 3% goes to the buyer's agent, which to me makes it seem like the buyer's agent actually works for the seller, as, well, it's the seller doing the paying.) But anyhow, let's focus on the seller's agent, as like I said, the buyer's agent has a interest in seeing to it that the deal goes down quickly, easily, and that there aren't legal issues later, but they don't have any interest in negotiating a lower price for the buyer, except to the extent that doing so could make the deal go through faster. So say I want to sell my house. There are some agents that will sell my house for 2%, or even 1%. why haven't those agents dominated the market? do the agents who take 3% negotiate higher prices for the buyer? The point here is that professional negotiators have set up systems where it's hard for you to send out requests for bids on standardized tasks, because such a system would lower their compensation. I used the real-estate market as an example, because there is a very standard compensation system, but it is largely divorced from (and in fact opposed to, from the buyer's side) the "hey you, here's some money, get me the best price." task that I would like to pay them for. note, I'm not saying that it's impossible to hire a negotiator... I'm just saying that it's a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Hiring a negotiator is dramatically more difficult than hiring someone who performs a well-defined task. Now, I'm with you, though, in that when you can reduce that negotiation task down to something standard you can put out bids on, you are going to do very well. I'm just saying that reducing that negotiation task down to something like that can quite often be a difficult task in and of itself.
      - eru 12y ago
        I wonder how Britain differs from the US to make much lower real estate transaction fees possible there.
bennesvig 12y ago
It's not difficult to use a lot of the examples from Cialdini to become more successful. Adding reviews or top clients to your website (social proof), stating that you only have 3 items left in stock (scarcity), giving free samples (reciprocity), etc.
walterbell 12y ago
Many people would benefit from role-playing both sides of con/deception games in childhood, as emotional existence proofs of active threats which cannot be discerned visually. The film Inception shows the use of psychological firewalls, termed "militarized subconscious" in the film.
anton_tarasenko 12y ago
Many biases have a short-term effect. If you delay the respective decision a bit ("I'll buy it tomorrow"), the impact of their tricks diminishes.
timepiece 12y ago
If you wanna influence people, street smarts and not book smarts would get the job done!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rdtsc 12y ago
> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases. Yes. And it has to be practiced and look natural. I remember one of the new hiries and wanna-be managers had probably read the "non-verbal cues used for persuasion" book. Was watching him during a meeting he was just going awkwardly through the motions. It was like he was checking off items from the list: Ok touch extened fingertips of one hand to those of the other [check], mirror posture of CEO [check]. It was mildly amusing and cringeworthy at the same time.
lsc 12y ago
eh, but the thing is, you don't have to "act" (I mean, you don't have to change your personality) to exploit biases. simply knowing that most people have a bias sets up a situation you can exploit when making rational decisions. I know that confident people, for example, are thought of as being more competent. If I am in a situation where confidence does not correlate with competence, being aware that others are valuing a person for a trait that is not relevant to the task at hand can allow me, sometimes, to find someone just as competent who is undervalued by the market. This really has nothing to do with changing your own attributes, this is just being aware of other people's biases, and taking arbitrage where you see it.
lsc 12y ago
>Becoming better or more successful by reading about biases seems difficult. Recognizing biases in yourself can also be really useful. If you know that this thing you are feeling is irrational and that negotiators are trained to make you feel that thing, you become much less vulnerable to manipulation. Re-read the bits on Consistency - more than once a good negotiator has gained significant advantage over me using techniques under that heading.
- visakanv 12y ago
  "Seems difficult" – You bet! Also, the trick is to go beyond reading. Most people read once or twice, go "ah, that makes sense", and then forget about it except when it's pointed out to them a little too late. Benjamin Franklin had this stuff figured out. If you want to become better or more successful, it has to become a part of your regular study and practice. You have to revisit the principles over and over again. You have to analyze your day each day and ask yourself what you could've done better, and decide how you're going to do things differently the next time around. So on and so forth.
  - lsc 12y ago
    >You have to analyze your day each day and ask yourself what you could've done better, and decide how you're going to do things differently the next time around. So on and so forth. If you are negotiating big things every day, you are... well, really you are a professional negotiator and you probably shouldn't be listening to me. If you are a professional negotiator and you aren't better at negotiating than I am... you had better find another line of work. I mean, yeah, we all negotiate little things every day, but for most technical people, even most technical people who do a little business, we have a few big negotiations every now and then, negotiations which can have serious negative consequences if we screw them up, and then a bunch of little negotiations every day that don't matter nearly as much as our technical performance. I think those big negotiations, yeah, going over what happened, especially after a big screwup is a good idea, yeah, but it's not something that is going to happen every day. It doesn't make sense for me to spend too much time thinking about the guy who talked me into co-locating a server at cost yesterday. It's super minor compared to, say, developing a better burn-in procedure or figuring out how to set up customer-accessible zfs backups. I also think that it's good, I mean, if you are not a negotiation specialist, to make it clear that you will give a go/no go some time after the negotiation, after you give it time to let your emotions settle and look at it more objectively. Remember that when negotiating in real time, if you are a primarily technical person, you are probably dealing with a professional negotiator, and should assume that they are as good at their job as you are at yours; this means that they are going to dramatically outclass you as a negotiator.
therealdrag0 12y ago
A big thing I got from learning about biases was to raise my standards of trust/truth of what other people say. Seeing how fallible people are was very powerful to me (coming from a religious background).

by hedgew 12y ago

fludlight 12y ago

> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases...However, learning to avoid or exploit biases is very difficult You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. As the founder of Spanx said "hire your weaknesses" [1]. [1] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/interview-how-spanx-became-billion-dollar-undergarment-empire http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/corner-office/int...

lsc 12y ago
>You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests. This is easier for some specialties than others. For example, if you want to hire someone who is good at negotiation, if they are actually good at negotiation, they should be able to extract as compensation the majority of the value they add. If you are especially bad at negotiation, or if it's difficult to tell exactly how much value they are adding, it's possible for them to extract more value as compensation than they are adding to the transaction.
- eru 12y ago
  That's why you need to multiple people who are good at negotiation to compete with each other for your bid.
  - lsc 12y ago
    That is, of course, a great idea if you can make it work. However, for that to work, you need to have a well-delineated task; you need all your bidders to be bidding on the same thing. Let us take the very simple case of real-estate. "Sell my house, you get 3% of the total selling price." (well, traditionally, the seller pays 6%, but 3% goes to the buyer's agent, which to me makes it seem like the buyer's agent actually works for the seller, as, well, it's the seller doing the paying.) But anyhow, let's focus on the seller's agent, as like I said, the buyer's agent has a interest in seeing to it that the deal goes down quickly, easily, and that there aren't legal issues later, but they don't have any interest in negotiating a lower price for the buyer, except to the extent that doing so could make the deal go through faster. So say I want to sell my house. There are some agents that will sell my house for 2%, or even 1%. why haven't those agents dominated the market? do the agents who take 3% negotiate higher prices for the buyer? The point here is that professional negotiators have set up systems where it's hard for you to send out requests for bids on standardized tasks, because such a system would lower their compensation. I used the real-estate market as an example, because there is a very standard compensation system, but it is largely divorced from (and in fact opposed to, from the buyer's side) the "hey you, here's some money, get me the best price." task that I would like to pay them for. note, I'm not saying that it's impossible to hire a negotiator... I'm just saying that it's a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Hiring a negotiator is dramatically more difficult than hiring someone who performs a well-defined task. Now, I'm with you, though, in that when you can reduce that negotiation task down to something standard you can put out bids on, you are going to do very well. I'm just saying that reducing that negotiation task down to something like that can quite often be a difficult task in and of itself.
    - eru 12y ago
      I wonder how Britain differs from the US to make much lower real estate transaction fees possible there.

bennesvig 12y ago

It's not difficult to use a lot of the examples from Cialdini to become more successful. Adding reviews or top clients to your website (social proof), stating that you only have 3 items left in stock (scarcity), giving free samples (reciprocity), etc.

walterbell 12y ago

Many people would benefit from role-playing both sides of con/deception games in childhood, as emotional existence proofs of active threats which cannot be discerned visually. The film Inception shows the use of psychological firewalls, termed "militarized subconscious" in the film.

anton_tarasenko 12y ago

Many biases have a short-term effect. If you delay the respective decision a bit ("I'll buy it tomorrow"), the impact of their tricks diminishes.

timepiece 12y ago

If you wanna influence people, street smarts and not book smarts would get the job done!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rdtsc 12y ago

> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases. Yes. And it has to be practiced and look natural. I remember one of the new hiries and wanna-be managers had probably read the "non-verbal cues used for persuasion" book. Was watching him during a meeting he was just going awkwardly through the motions. It was like he was checking off items from the list: Ok touch extened fingertips of one hand to those of the other [check], mirror posture of CEO [check]. It was mildly amusing and cringeworthy at the same time.

lsc 12y ago

eh, but the thing is, you don't have to "act" (I mean, you don't have to change your personality) to exploit biases. simply knowing that most people have a bias sets up a situation you can exploit when making rational decisions. I know that confident people, for example, are thought of as being more competent. If I am in a situation where confidence does not correlate with competence, being aware that others are valuing a person for a trait that is not relevant to the task at hand can allow me, sometimes, to find someone just as competent who is undervalued by the market. This really has nothing to do with changing your own attributes, this is just being aware of other people's biases, and taking arbitrage where you see it.

lsc 12y ago

>Becoming better or more successful by reading about biases seems difficult. Recognizing biases in yourself can also be really useful. If you know that this thing you are feeling is irrational and that negotiators are trained to make you feel that thing, you become much less vulnerable to manipulation. Re-read the bits on Consistency - more than once a good negotiator has gained significant advantage over me using techniques under that heading.

visakanv 12y ago
"Seems difficult" – You bet! Also, the trick is to go beyond reading. Most people read once or twice, go "ah, that makes sense", and then forget about it except when it's pointed out to them a little too late. Benjamin Franklin had this stuff figured out. If you want to become better or more successful, it has to become a part of your regular study and practice. You have to revisit the principles over and over again. You have to analyze your day each day and ask yourself what you could've done better, and decide how you're going to do things differently the next time around. So on and so forth.
- lsc 12y ago
  >You have to analyze your day each day and ask yourself what you could've done better, and decide how you're going to do things differently the next time around. So on and so forth. If you are negotiating big things every day, you are... well, really you are a professional negotiator and you probably shouldn't be listening to me. If you are a professional negotiator and you aren't better at negotiating than I am... you had better find another line of work. I mean, yeah, we all negotiate little things every day, but for most technical people, even most technical people who do a little business, we have a few big negotiations every now and then, negotiations which can have serious negative consequences if we screw them up, and then a bunch of little negotiations every day that don't matter nearly as much as our technical performance. I think those big negotiations, yeah, going over what happened, especially after a big screwup is a good idea, yeah, but it's not something that is going to happen every day. It doesn't make sense for me to spend too much time thinking about the guy who talked me into co-locating a server at cost yesterday. It's super minor compared to, say, developing a better burn-in procedure or figuring out how to set up customer-accessible zfs backups. I also think that it's good, I mean, if you are not a negotiation specialist, to make it clear that you will give a go/no go some time after the negotiation, after you give it time to let your emotions settle and look at it more objectively. Remember that when negotiating in real time, if you are a primarily technical person, you are probably dealing with a professional negotiator, and should assume that they are as good at their job as you are at yours; this means that they are going to dramatically outclass you as a negotiator.

therealdrag0 12y ago

A big thing I got from learning about biases was to raise my standards of trust/truth of what other people say. Seeing how fallible people are was very powerful to me (coming from a religious background).