#249: Pendulum Bias, Myside Bias & Normalcy Bias
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Even More Biases
I. Pendulum Bias
Good decision-making depends on mitigating cognitive biases. Luckily for this newsletter, there are many of them. And people keep making up new ones. Like Pendulum Bias, as explained by former intel analyst Michael Morell in the MasterClass course The Art of Intelligence.
Rather than returning to a balanced, evidence-based position, we tend to overcorrect in the opposite direction after a major mistake. Morell explained it in the context of wrong analysis when it came to the war in Iraq:
We actually missed the nuclear weapons program the first time around. It was much further along than we thought. So we didn’t want to make that mistake again, so the pendulum swung too far back.
👉 In case you’re interested, I recently reviewed The Art of Intelligence and tried to look behind the dramatisation and tense background music.
II. Myside Bias
Myside Bias is what happens when your brain quietly switches from trying to figure out what’s true to trying to defend what you already believe. You still feel rational, but you start to favour information that supports your position and instinctively push back on anything that challenges it.
Two people can read the same article. One thinks it’s solid evidence while the other thinks it’s flawed. The difference usually isn’t the data. It’s what they already believed going in. Once you’ve taken a side, your mind starts acting like a lawyer, building a case, rather than a judge weighing both sides evenly.
It’s one of those ideas you’re reading about a lot here. It’s closely related to Confirmation Bias and Motivated Reasoning. A simple solution is to change the perspective and ask yourself, “Do I still see it that way?”
III. Normalcy Bias
In 2022, a man named Derren Brown hypnotised a stranger to assassinate the beloved British actor Stephen Fry on an open stage during a performance. As the shots rang out and Sir Stephen dropped to the ground, the audience reacted…not at all. They didn’t seem to care.
Of course, this was just a stunt performed by Brown, an infamous hypnotist. He wanted to know if you could manipulate someone into committing a violent crime. To be frank, the whole thing looks so surreal that I’m not entirely sure whether the audience had been primed in some way. Still, it serves as a striking illustration of a psychological phenomenon called Normalcy Bias.
Normalcy Bias is our tendency to assume everything is fine, even when it isn’t. When something shocking happens, we often downplay it or reinterpret it as harmless because the brain prefers familiar explanations.
That’s why people ignore fire alarms or fail to act in emergencies. Especially if others stay calm. In the theatre, the audience probably assumed the shooting was part of the show, so they stayed passive. Since no one else reacted, the implicit signal was that there was nothing to worry about. 🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com