7 Biases That Everyone Has (And How They F*ck Up Your Life)

You’re walking down the street and you have your bag stolen by a person of a specific demographic. You’re pissed because your iPod was in there and it was autographed by the only man you would go heterosexual for. You falsely correlate the specific demographic with bag snatchers and decide that all people in that demographic are terrible human beings that deserve nothing less than having all parking spaces that look empty, filled with motorcycles which they only notice at the last moment, just after they’ve slowed down to turn.

Due to the false correlation you’ve created, you now hug your bag close each time you see a person of that demographic – thus, the sweeping generalisation of bigotry is born. This false thinking is pretty useful, if you consider a poor life choice to be useful. It’s not a stretch to think how this glitch in thinking can lead to poor medical choices and for Heather Dexter, our naturopath with the qualifications of a tapeworm, her children faced the consequences of her poor choices.

I wrote an article last week that discusses alternative medicine and a point I raised was how alternative medicine typically targets illnesses that resolve on their own. Tummy aches, headaches, hangovers and sometimes - whooping cough. Heather Dexter’s children did get through their whooping cough, but many children do not especially infants and immunocomprised children. The illusory correlation effect accounts for why people still insist that alternative treatments like the magic ghost water that is homeopath, a treatment so thoroughly debunked, its continued existence is embarrassing – have played some part in their recovery.

You can see where I’m going with this. The illusion that something has worked to help you recover from an illness, when it has done nothing at all can lead to several things: you may continue to waste money on something that isn’t working; you may forego actual medical treatment when the need arises resulting in harm or death and/or you might make the first two choices for your children.