Cognitive fallacy in life

I recently took an online course on The Science of Everyday Thinking on edX, and I feel that I have gained a lot. What is particularly impressive are several cognitive fallacies that are common in life but are often ignored and taken for granted.

The first is Confirmation Bias, that is, people have pre-identified a point of view or position, then they will selectively accept the information around them, focusing on collecting those who support themselves and further strengthen the original concept, and those who do not support or even oppose themselves. Evidence is often ignored. In this era of information explosion, no matter what you are looking for to support the evidence (such as the existence of aliens / vampires in the world) can be found on the Internet, so your idea is further strengthened, even if there are countless other evidences Prove this point is wrong. However, some of the beliefs that many people believe, such as "black cats bring bad luck" and "arthritis pain is worse on rainy days", have no scientific basis. There is no connection between them, because people's confirmation bias pays special attention to every occasion where black cats = bad luck/rainy days = joint pain, and black cats have no bad luck/sunny days and joint pains are ignored.

The second is regression to the mean, that is, regression to the mean. We will always have good and bad performance in life, and there will always be times when things around us are good and bad for us, but extreme for and against will eventually return to normal. . A typical example is that many rookie athletes who performed very well in the first year often did not perform well in the second year, in fact, because they performed exceptionally in the first year, and the second year just returned to normal levels. Similarly, some bosses feel that if they criticize employees, their performance will improve, but if they praise them, their performance is not as good as before. In fact, it is because the performance of the employees before the criticism is just lower than the personal average, and then they will gradually return to normal, that is, increase. If the employee's performance is just higher than the individual's average, then it will return to normal, that is, it will decline. So, when you think everything is going well, it may not be so good and when you think everything is going bad, don't worry too much and always go back to normal.

The lesson I just started today talked about how difficult it is to change people's thinking. The example is that it is generally believed that the small class is better than the large class in terms of teaching effect, but many experiments have proved that under the same conditions, the two There is no noticeable difference. The researcher also asked his students to design their own experiments to study. However, after the same results were obtained in the experiments that the students participated in, these students still generally believed that the small class was better, and it seemed impossible to say why. strong evidence. In cognitive psychology, when people encounter evidence that is completely contrary to their beliefs, it often takes a considerable amount of time to reconcile all the information. It may also take a while for this powerful evidence to be diluted, so your concept is still It won't change, which proves how difficult it is to convince a person. When two people are debating face-to-face, it is almost impossible to convince the opposite party on the spot.