Summary

The article discusses five additional cognitive biases that can hinder creative output and provides strategies for recognizing and overcoming them to produce better work.

Abstract

The author of the article, August Birch, delves into the psychological pitfalls that creators often face, expanding on a previous post about cognitive biases. These biases include the choice supportive bias, where we favor our past decisions; unit bias, which compels us to complete full units of tasks or consumption; hyperbolic discounting, which leads us to prefer immediate smaller rewards over larger future ones; hindsight bias, where past events seem more predictable than they were; and the bandwagon effect, where we adopt behaviors or choices because they are popular. Birch emphasizes the importance of recognizing these biases to prevent them from stifling creativity and encourages creators to critically evaluate their decisions, seek external perspectives, and resist the urge to conform, ultimately aiming to produce work that is innovative and transformative.

Opinions

The author suggests that cognitive biases are like unproductive psychological luggage that we carry with us, affecting our decision-making and creative processes.
Recognizing cognitive biases is the first step to producing our best creative work, as it allows us to challenge and potentially change our behavioral patterns.
Our brains prefer routine and familiar behaviors, which can be detrimental to creativity if those behaviors are not conducive to innovation.
The choice supportive bias can lead to a chain of bad decisions that we rationalize simply because we made them.
Unit bias can influence how we approach tasks and deadlines, potentially leading to anxiety or dissatisfaction if we do not complete them in the way we envisioned.
Hyperbolic discounting can cause us to make short-sighted decisions that may not be in the best interest of our long-term creative goals.
Hindsight bias can distort our perception of our predictive abilities, making us overconfident in our intuition about past events and potentially leading to poor future decisions.
The bandwagon effect can stifle originality and lead creators to follow trends rather than innovate based on the merits of the work itself.
The author advocates for a critical self-evaluation and the willingness to fail faster to succeed faster, ensuring that the best creative work can emerge without being hindered by cognitive biases.

Five More Hidden Cognitive Biases that Silence Our Best Creative Output

How to prevent your creator’s brain from tricking itself into mediocrity

Five More Hidden Cognitive Biases that Silence our Best Creative Work

A month ago I wrote a cognitive bias post that went viral (for me). Since then, I’ve worked to collect a few more of these gems we carry with us, like unproductive, psychological luggage.

As creators, it’s our job to bring innovation, entertainment, and change.

When we get trapped in our own mental soup, it’s hard to filter reality versus the inner chatter. We’ve got some ancient forces working against us, and it’s time to call them out again.

The first step is to recognize the biases exist.

We may not be able to eliminate these buggers, but once we catch them in action, there’s a good chance we can push through them to our best work. Our brains aren’t fans of new behaviors.

We crave behavioral routine. Routine saves mental calories.

Whether we exhibit positive behaviors or not, the neurons that fire together, wire together. The more we repeat a behavior, good or bad, the more we make it physically permanent in our minds.

What do these permanent behaviors have to do with cognitive biases?

Think of CBs as behavioral bait. Like a little program — if this happens, I should do this. We chase that bait enough and the behavior becomes rote — part of our hard-wiring. And once that bond is built, these behaviors are much harder to break.

We need to recognize these biases so we can produce our best work.

The worst part of CBs are we don’t recognize anything wrong with our behavior or decision-making. The process feels rational and natural. But it’s not. And these sinister mental tricks are sabotaging our best work from development.

Here’s a link to Part A. of this post (the one that went me-viral):

Five Hidden Cognitive Biases That Keep Us From Our Best Creative Work

Whether we write, paint, build, move, or think — our minds are wired to sabotage our success

medium.com

Five more cognitive biases

1. Choice supportive bias —

When we look back to our past decisions we tend to give more favorable attributes to the option we selected. For example, if you purchased a new printer, although it may not have the best color, the best quality, or the best ink usage, we’ll feel our decision was the right decision, because we made the decision — not for any analytical reason.

This bias can hurt our creative work, because we may progress through a chain of bad decisions/choices and convince ourselves we made the right choice, because, hey, we make good choices.

We remember more of the positive aspects of the choices we make and tend to remember more of the negative aspects of the choices we don’t.

To counter-act choice supportive bias, it’s important to step back and take an impersonal, critical evaluation of choices that affect our creative work. Here, an outsider’s opinion may be in order too. We can be the most-blind to the decisions closest to us.

2. Unit bias —

Whether it’s time, a food portion on a plate, or an amount of money, it makes us feel good to complete full units. Say, we give ourselves 30 minutes to read. The reading session is interrupted by family dinner. Because we gave ourselves the self-prescribed unit of time it will feel very unnerving — maybe angry or anxious.

We clean our plates to finish units. We spend all the money in our wallets to complete units. We may take too long on a project to fill a certain calendar unit.

You’ll eat more candy if it’s served with a large spoon versus a small spoon. You’ll eat less food if served off a smaller plate. If given an hour to complete a task (or meeting) it’s likely you’ll fill the hour, unless interrupted.

Although this bias is aimed more towards overeating, it can have large consequences for creatives too.

We give ourselves deadlines we must follow if we want to produce effectively. If our deadline is unrealistic — too long or short — the unit bias can have a strong effect on how we feel about the work. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with our project, but our unit bias made us anxious, because we missed a self-inflicted productions deadline.

3. Hyperbolic discounting —

This is our tendency to choose a smaller reward we’ll get sooner, versus choosing a larger reward we’ll get some time in the future. The instant-gratification may feel better, but the choice could have drastic consequences for our work.

We give less value to the long-term reward, even if the longer reward is worth more.

Maybe you choose a terrible client with cash in hand, versus the dream client, who can’t pay you now, but is willing to give you a percentage of future sales in perpetuity. Since you can’t hold the future sales in your hand, many of us will jump with the terrible client.

4. Hindsight bias —

This is our tendency to perceive past events as something we could’ve predicted much more than we could’ve possibly predicted it. This is also called the “I knew it all along” phenomenon. We oversimplify both cause and effect once an event occurs.

This happens to us daily. Our brains trick us into thinking we’ve got better intuition than we do, AFTER an event occurs.

This so-called ability could lead us to make irrational decisions in the future. It’s important to take a step back and look at all the facts before making future decision based on our perceived ability to predict the past.

5. Bandwagon effect —

This one is how it sounds. We tend to do a certain behavior or make a certain purchase, only because other people are doing it too. We have an inner need to fit in and meld with the herd.

The bandwagon is a strong force we much constantly fight against as we blaze new trails with our creative work.

Are we doing something because everyone in our industry does it, or are we doing this activity because it’s best for the work? This is an important self-evaluation we should make — a quick breath before leaping into the status-quo.

The 99 No’s Strategy: How Successful Creatives Finish What They Start

The creator’s guide to shipping work that matters most

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We need your best work

You can’t avoid the tricks your mind will play on your future decisions. These are hard-wired, evolutionary behaviors that help keep us physically safe.

Since we’re no longer running from lions we’ve got to step back and analyze our big decisions.

We need your best creative work to come-through, without the clouded judgement of cognitive biases. We’ll never get rid of them, but we can get closer to recognizing them.

It’s a wiring problem, not a YOU problem.

Your work is fantastic. But we need the best parts of it to shine through, not the rushed bits, or the bandwagon features. We want the novel and the transformational.

We want to push the limits with our work. Limits cause our brains to pump the brakes. We’ve got to recognize those brakes aren’t the work’s fault. It’s an electrical problem.

We also must recognize failed projects sooner. To fail faster is to succeed faster.

Just because we made something doesn’t mean it’s the right something. But the good work is in there. We’ve got to be the ones to tease it out and present it to our tribe.

We need your best stuff.

We’re waiting for you.

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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