by Rolf Dobelli
Earthquake in Sumatra. Plane crash in Russia. Man holds daughter captive in cellar for thirty years. Heidi Klum separates from Seal. Record salaries at Bank of America. Attack in Pakistan. Resignation of Mali’s president. New world record in shot put.
Do you really need to know all these things?
We are incredibly well informed, yet we know incredibly little. Why? Because two centuries ago, we invented a toxic form of knowledge called “news.” News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetizing, easy to digest—and highly destructive in the long run.
Three years ago, I began an experiment. I stopped reading and listening to the news. I canceled all newspaper and magazine subscriptions. Television and radio were disposed of. I deleted the news apps from my iPhone. I didn’t touch a single free newspaper and deliberately looked the other way when someone on a plane tried to offer me any such reading material. The first weeks were hard. Very hard. I was constantly afraid of missing something. But after a while, I had a new outlook. The result after three years: clearer thoughts, more valuable insights, better decisions, and much more time. And the best thing? I haven’t missed anything important. My social network—not Facebook, the one that exists in the real world consisting of flesh-and-blood friends and acquaintances—works as a news filter and keeps me in the loop.
A dozen reasons exist to give news a wide berth. Here are the top three: First, our brains react disproportionately to different types of information. Scandalous, shocking, people-based, loud, fast-changing details all stimulate us, whereas abstract, complex, and unprocessed information sedates us. News producers capitalize on this. Gripping stories, garish images, and sensational “facts” capture our attention. Recall for a moment their business models: Advertisers buy space and thus finance the news circus on the condition that their ads will be seen. The result: Everything subtle, complex, abstract, and profound must be systematically filtered out, even though such stories are much more relevant to our lives and to our understanding of the world. As a result of news consumption, we walk around with a distorted mental map of the risks and threats we actually face.
Second, news is irrelevant. In the past twelve months, you have probably consumed about ten thousand news snippets—perhaps as many as thirty per day. Be very honest: Name one of them, just one that helped you make a better decision—for your life, your career, or your business—compared with not having this piece of news. No one I have asked has been able to name more than two useful news stories—out of ten thousand. A miserable result. News organizations assert that their information gives you a competitive advantage. Too many fall for this. In reality, news consumption represents a competitive disadvantage. If news really helped people advance, journalists would be at the top of the income pyramid. They aren’t—quite the opposite.
Third, news is a waste of time. An average human being squanders half a day each week on reading about current affairs. In global terms, this is an immense loss of productivity. Take the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. Out of sheer thirst for recognition, terrorists murdered two hundred people. Let’s say a billion people devoted an hour of their time to following the aftermath: They viewed the minute-by-minute updates and listened to the inane chatter of a few “experts” and “commentators.” This is a very realistic “guesstimate” since India has more than a billion inhabitants. Thus our conservative calculation: One billion people multiplied by an hour’s distraction equals one billion hours of work stoppage. If we convert this, we learn that news consumption wasted around two thousand lives—ten times more than the attack. A sarcastic but accurate observation.
I would predict that turning your back on news will benefit you as much as purging any of the other ninety-eight flaws we have covered in the pages of this book. Kick the habit—completely. Instead, read long background articles and books. Yes, nothing beats books for understanding the world.
Epilogue
The pope asked Michelangelo: “Tell me the secret of your genius. How have you created the statue of David, the masterpiece of all masterpieces?” Michelangelo’s answer: “It’s simple. I removed everything that is not David.”
Let’s be honest. We don’t know for sure what makes us successful. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes us happy. But we know with certainty what destroys success or happiness. This realization, as simple as it is, is fundamental: Negative knowledge (what not to do) is much more potent than positive knowledge (what to do).
Thinking more clearly and acting more shrewdly means adopting Michelangelo’s method: Don’t focus on David. Instead, focus on everything that is not David and chisel it away. In our case: Eliminate all errors and better thinking will follow.
The Greeks, Romans, and medieval thinkers had a term for this approach: via negativa. Literally, the negative path, the path of renunciation, of exclusion, of reduction. Theologians were the first to tread the via negativa: We cannot say what God is; we can only say what God is not. Applied to the present day: We cannot say what brings us success. We can pin down only what blocks or obliterates success. Eliminate the downside, the thinking errors, and the upside will take care of itself. This is all we need to know.
As a novelist and company founder, I have fallen into a variety of traps. Fortunately I was always able to free myself from them. Nowadays when I hold presentations in front of doctors, CEOs, board members, investors, politicians, or government officials, I sense a kinship. I feel that we are sitting in the same boat—after all, we are all trying to row through life without getting swallowed up by the maelstroms. Still, many people are uneasy with the via negativa. It is counterintuitive. It is even countercultural, flying in the face of contemporary wisdom. But look around and you’ll find plenty of examples of the via negativa at work. This is what the legendary investor Warren Buffett writes about himself and his partner Charlie Munger: “Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them.” Welcome to the via negativa.
I have listed almost one hundred thinking errors in this book without answering the question: What are thinking errors anyway? What is irrationality? Why do we fall into these traps? Two theories of irrationality exist: a hot and a cold. The hot theory is as old as the hills. Here is Plato’s analogy: A rider steers wildly galloping horses; the rider signifies reason and the galloping horses embody emotions. Reason tames feelings. If this fails, irrationality runs free. Another example: Feelings are like bubbling lava. Usually, reason can keep a lid on them, but every now and then the lava of irrationality erupts. Hence hot irrationality. There is no reason to fret about logic: It is error-free; it’s just that, sometimes, emotions overpower it.
This hot theory of irrationality boiled and bubbled for centuries. For John Calvin, the founder of a strict form of Protestantism in the 1500s, such feelings represented evil, and only by focusing on God could you repel them. People who underwent volcanic eruptions of emotion were of the devil. They were tortured and killed. According to Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s theory, the rationalist “ego” and the moralistic “superego” control the impulsive “id.” But that theory holds less water in the real world. Forget about obligation and discipline. To believe that we can completely control our emotions through thinking is illusory—as illusory as trying to make your hair grow by willing it to.
On the other hand, the cold theory of irrationality is still young. After the Second World War, many searched for explanations about the irrationality of the Nazis. Emotional outbursts were rare in Hitler’s leadership ranks. Even his fiery speeches were nothing more than masterful performances. It was not molten eruptions but stone-cold calculation that resulted in the Nazi madness. The same can be said of Stalin or of the Khmer Rouge.
In the 1960s, psychologists began to do away with Freud’s claims and to examine our thinking, decisions, and actions scientifically. The result was a cold theory of irrationality that states: Thinking is in itself not pur
e, but prone to error. This affects everyone. Even highly intelligent people fall into the same cognitive traps. Likewise, errors are not randomly distributed. We systematically err in the same direction. That makes our mistakes predictable, and thus fixable to a degree—but only to a degree, never completely. For a few decades, the origins of these errors remained in the dark. Everything else in our body is relatively reliable—heart, muscles, lungs, immune system. Why should our brains of all things experience lapse after lapse?
Thinking is a biological phenomenon. Evolution has shaped it just as it has the forms of animals or the colors of flowers. Suppose we could go back fifty thousand years, grab hold of an ancestor, and bring him back with us into the present. We send him to the hairdresser and put him in a Hugo Boss suit. Would he stand out on the street? No. Of course, he would have to learn English, how to drive, and how to operate a cell phone, but we had to learn those things, too. Biology has dispelled all doubt: Physically, and that includes cognitively, we are hunter-gatherers in Hugo Boss (or H&M, as the case may be).
What has changed markedly since ancient times is the environment in which we live. Back then, things were simple and stable. We lived in small groups of about fifty people. There was no significant technological or social progress. Only in the last ten thousand years did the world begin to transform dramatically, with the development of crops, livestock, villages, cities, global trade, and financial markets. Since industrialization, little is left of the environment for which our brain is optimized. If you spend fifteen minutes in a shopping mall, you will pass more people than our ancestors saw during their entire lifetimes. Whoever claims to know how the world will look in ten years is made into a laughingstock less than a year after such a pronouncement. In the past ten thousand years, we have created a world that we no longer understand. Everything is more sophisticated, but also more complex and interdependent. The result is overwhelming material prosperity, but also lifestyle diseases (such as type 2 diabetes, lung cancer, and depression) and errors in thinking. If the complexity continues to rise—and it will, that much is certain—these errors will only increase and intensify.
In our hunter-gatherer past, activity paid off more often than reflection did. Lightning-fast reactions were vital, and long ruminations were ruinous. If your hunter-gatherer buddies suddenly bolted, it made sense to follow suit—regardless of whether a saber-toothed tiger or a boar had startled them. If you failed to run away, and it turned out to be a tiger, the price of a first-degree error was death. On the other hand, if you had just fled from a board, this lesser mistake would have cost you only a few calories. It paid to be wrong about the same things. Whoever was wired differently exited the gene pool after the first or second incidence. We are the descendants of those homines sapientes who tend to flee when the crowd does. But in the modern world, this intuitive behavior is disadvantageous. Today’s world rewards single-minded contemplation and independent action. Anyone who has fallen victim to stock market hype has witnessed that.
Evolutionary psychology is still mostly a theory, but a very convincing one at that. It explains the majority of flaws, though not all of them. Consider the following statement: “Every Hershey bar comes in a brown wrapper. Thus, every candy bar in a brown wrapper must be a Hershey bar.” Even intelligent people are susceptible to this flawed conclusion—so are native tribes that, for the most part, remain untouched by civilization. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were certainly not impervious to faulty logic. Some bugs in our thinking are hardwired and have nothing to do with the “mutation” of our environment.
Why is that? Evolution does not “optimize” us completely. As long as we advance beyond our competitors (i.e., beat the Neanderthals), we can get away with error-laced behavior. Consider the cuckoo: For hundreds of thousands of years, they have laid their eggs in the nests of songbirds, which then incubate and even feed the cuckoo chicks. This represents a behavioral error that evolution has not erased from the smaller birds; it is not deemed to be serious enough.
A second, parallel explanation of why our mistakes are so persistent took shape in the late 1990s: Our brains are designed to reproduce rather than search for the truth. In other words, we use our thoughts primarily to persuade. Whoever convinces others secures power and thus access to resources. Such assets represent a major advantage for mating and for rearing offspring. That truth is, at best, a secondary focus and is reflected in the book market: Novels sell much better than nonfiction titles, in spite of the latter’s superior candor.
Finally, a third explanation exists: Intuitive decisions, even if they lack logic, are better under certain circumstances. So-called heuristic research deals with this topic. For many decisions, we lack the necessary information, so we are forced to use mental shortcuts and rules of thumb (heuristics). If you are drawn to different potential romantic partners, you must evaluate whom to marry. This is not a rational decision; if you rely solely on logic, you will remain single forever. In short, we often decide intuitively and justify our choices later. Many decisions (career, life partner, investments) take place subconsciously. A fraction of a second later, we construct a reason so that we feel we made a conscious choice. Alas, we do not behave like scientists who are purely interested in objective facts. Instead, we think like lawyers, crafting the best possible justification for a predetermined conclusion.
So, forget about the “left and right brain” that semi-intelligent self-help books describe. Much more important is the difference between intuitive and rational thinking. Both have legitimate applications. The intuitive mind is swift, spontaneous, and energy-saving. Rational thinking is slow, demanding, and energy-guzzling (in the form of blood sugar). Nobody has described this better than the great Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Since I started to collect cognitive errors, people often ask me how I manage to live an error-free life. The answer is: I don’t. In fact, I don’t even try. Just like everybody else, I make snap decisions by consulting not my thoughts but my feelings. For the most part I substitute the question “What do I think about this?” with “How do I feel about this?” Quite frankly, anticipating and avoiding fallacies is a costly undertaking.
To make things simple, I have set myself the following rules: In situations where the possible consequences are large (i.e., important personal or business decisions), I try to be as reasonable and rational as possible when choosing. I take out my list of errors and check them off one by one, just like a pilot does. I’ve created a handy checklist decision tree, and I use it to examine important decisions with a fine-tooth comb. In situations where the consequences are small (i.e., regular or Diet Pepsi, sparkling or flat water?), I forget about rational optimization and let my intuition take over. Thinking is tiring. Therefore, if the potential harm is small, don’t rack your brains; such errors won’t do lasting damage. You’ll live better like this. Nature doesn’t seem to mind if our decisions are perfect or not, as long as we can maneuver ourselves through life—and as long as we are ready to be rational when it comes to the crunch. And there’s one other area where I let my intuition take the lead: when I am in my “circle of competence.” If you practice an instrument, you learn the notes and tell your fingers how to play them. Over time, you know the keys or the strings inside out. You see a musical score and your hands play the notes almost automatically. Warren Buffett reads balance sheets like professional musicians read scores. This is his circle of competence, the field he intuitively understands and masters. So, find out where your circle of competence is. Get a clear grasp of it. Hint: It’s smaller than you think. If you face a consequential decision outside that circle, apply the hard, slow, rational thinking. For everything else, give your intuition free rein.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb for inspiring me to write this book, even if his advice was not to publish it under any circumstances. Alas, he encouraged me to write novels, arguing that nonfiction isn’t “sexy.” Thank
s to Koni Gebistorf, who masterfully edited the original German texts, and to Nicky Griffin, who translated the book into English (when she was away from her office at Google). I couldn’t have picked better publishers and editors than Hollis Heimbouch from HarperCollins and Drummond Moir from Sceptre who have given these chapters their final finesse. Thanks to the scientists of the ZURICH.MINDS community for the countless debates about the state of research. Special thanks go to Gerd Gigerenzer, Roy Baumeister, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Robert Cialdini, Jonathan Haidt, Ernst Fehr, Bruno Frey, Iris Bohnet, Dan Golstein, Tomáš Sedláček and the philosopher John Gray for the enlightening conversations. I also thank my literary agent, John Brockman, and his superb crew, for helping me with both the American and British editions of this book. Thanks to Frank Schirrmacher for finding space for my columns in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to Giovanni di Lorenzo and Moritz Mueller-Wirth for their publication in Die Zeit (Germany), and to Martin Spieler who gave them a good home in Switzerland’s Sonntagszeitung. Without the weekly pressure to forge one’s thoughts into a readable format, my notes would never have been published in book form.
For everything that appears here after the countless stages of editing, I alone bear the responsibility. My greatest thanks goes to my wife, Sabine Ried, who proves to me every day that the “good life”—as defined by Aristotle—consists of far more than clear thoughts and clever actions.
A Note on Sources
Hundreds of studies have been conducted on the vast majority of cognitive and behavioral errors. In a scholarly work, the complete reference section would easily double the pages of this book. I have focused on the most important quotes, technical references, recommendations for further reading, and comments. The knowledge encompassed in this book is based on the research carried out in the fields of cognitive and social psychology over the past three decades.