Too often we tend to look at biases with mistrust, but what if we told you that there is one that is able to make us look more attractive? Would you reject it regardless? It’s called the cheerleader effect, the cognitive bias that leads us to think that individuals are more attractive than they really are when they are in a group, rather than alone.
This riddle, known as the surgeon dilemma, is useful to show how prejudices, stereotypes, convictions and beliefs work. How much and in what way we allow to be influenced by biases and heuristics, or, more commonly, mental traps, as further proof of man’s irrationality.
The hot hand fallacy is therefore that effect that makes us think that, after a series of successes, other positive results will occur (and vice versa).
In the 90’s, a new therapy was introduced in the US, consisting in the daily assumption of various drugs, capable of increasing the survival rate of HIV-positive patients, if followed with at least 95% adherence to therapy.
A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
There are many ways to test our decision-making ability. What I propose is a simple riddle, but one that must be answered instinctively.
