How To Not Be The B*tch Of Your Own Brain

Hey guys Happy Thursday!

Hope you guys are crushing this week!

Today I want to teach you about the 25 cognitive biases of the brain.

What are cognitive biases and why do you need to understand them?

Cognitive biases are systematic errors that occur in our brains when we’re thinking and processing information.

The ways people make decisions.

They basically manipulate your mental process with intrinsic thinking flaws.

Learning these will help you avoid making bad judgments to avoid negative outcomes.

But also in business and marketing, you won't be able to sell at a high level or persuade people to take an action if you haven't mastered the 25 cognitive biases.

Once you’ve understood these, you'll be the person teaching this because no one really understands them.

Im going to describe what each one is, but also give you tips on how to implement them into your marketing and business.

So let’s get into it.

The Psychology Of Human Misjudgment:

1. Reward/Pain Tendency: All human activity is moving towards perceived reward and away from pain.

   • In your marketing, the place to always start is the rewards. Offer big rewards to persuade people. People tend to also flee away from pain so start by exploring some deep issues of your audience.

2. Liking/Loving Tendency: We'll most likely get along with people we like.

   • In your marketing, be nice, look nice, relate to people, and show you're similar and people will be hypnotized by you.

3. Disliking/Hating Tendency: We tend to ignore all the positive stuff about people we don’t like, Hitler did lots of bad but people ignore any of his good deeds.

4. Doubt Avoidance Tendency: If we are unsure about a decision we try to quickly remove any doubt by making an ill-informed quick decision.

   • In your marketing, you want to move doubt from your customer's brains, if you sound doubtful they will be too.

5. Inconsistency Avoidance Tendency: Our brains are hesitant to change, and we have the desire to be consistent with what we have already done, this makes eliminating bad habits difficult.

   • In your marketing make people commit to something prior to your request. This traps people into later compliance. Also make every step in your message, website, and brand consistent.

6. Curiosity Tendency: One of the main drivers in human progress, digging deeper into something and being able to learn new things.

   • In your marketing, you must create more curiosity, and say things that people haven't heard before. Always leave people hanging.

7. Kantian Fairness Tendency: The tendency to treat others how you want to be treated. A good example is People letting you cut them in driving lanes because they expect the same in return later.

   • In your marketing make it fair for your customers. Free product and cover shipping, so you can upsell on the next page at full price, is a great example of this.

8. Envy/Jealousy Tendency: It is not greed that drives the world it is envy, this is why showing off too much might make people dislike you. One of the strongest of all human emotions is when we see people have what we don't have.

   • In your marketing don't be afraid to show off what you have but be careful, don't rub it in too much so you don't become unlikeable.

9. Reciprocation Tendency: We should try to repay in kind what another person has provided us. If someone does us a favor, we do one in return.

   • In your marketing provide people with a small favor, give people things for every action you want them to take. People would go to great lengths to avoid being someone who takes but never gives.

10. Influence From Mere Association Tendency: We're manipulated by mere association. It can be a group of people, the quality of a product, or advertising.

    • In your marketing associate yourself with authority figures. Quote books and celebrities.

11. Simple Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial: We have a habit of distorting the facts and refusing to believe the uncertainties of life by denying them.

    • In your marketing try not to use this one as much but use it lightly.

12. Excessive Self-Regard Tendency: People have a tendency to think highly of themselves.

    • In your marketing make people feel special and that just for them, you're going to do something important. Stroke their ego a little.

13. Overoptimism: The tendency to be overly optimistic.

    • In your marketing use over-optimism on people's goals.

14. Deprived Super Reaction Tendency: The tendency to act irrationally with intensity even with small losses sometimes.

    • In your marketing, use limited-time offers or scarcity tactics. Appeal to people's procrastination because whenever opportunities are threatened or limited, it’ll make people desire them significantly more than previously. Use this a lot but ethically.

15. Social Proof Tendency: The automatic tendency to think and act as others around us think and act.

    • In your marketing use more testimonials because the principle of social proof operates more powerfully when observing the behavior of people like us.

16. Contrast Misreaction Tendency: The tendency to be affected by the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. If the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it much differently than it actually is. If we see a beautiful woman first, another fairly looking woman will strike us as less attractive than she actually is because of the first woman.

    • In your marketing, you want to contrast huge things with little cost, and price minimization. “This costs the price of a coffee” OR Contrast your competitors.

17. Stress Influence Tendency: Stress can cause us to make bad decisions. Some stress can improve performance but heavy stress often leads to dysfunction.

    • In your marketing hit your customer's pain points to create stress. You can do it by using stories.

18. Availability Misweighing Tendency: The tendency for our brains to work with what is easily available to us, like fast food.

    • In your marketing make it clean and easy for people to buy from you or take an action you’re telling them to. Don't make the process confusing. People buy what's easily available to them.

    • Remove the friction in your website, Call To Action, copywriting, etc.

19. Use or Lose it Tendency: The tendency to lose an ability if you don't continue to use it or practice it. People only learn things for a reason instead of actually trying to understand them.

20. Drug Misinfluence Tendency: A strong tendency that costs lives, the way we use substances to avoid pain.

21. Senescence Misinfluence Tendency: As we age it becomes harder to learn new skills, and adapt to the ages we work with.

22. Authority Misinfluence Tendency: We tend to trust and respect leaders too much even when they make mistakes. We also trust leaders in areas where they are not experts. This is known as the Halo Effect.

23. Twaddle Tendency: People like to spend a lot of time on nonsense and waste their time on distractions like tv shows.

    • In your marketing, because of this bias, it's okay to make things longer with a lot of content.

24. Reason-Respecting Tendency: The tendency to want the answers to something but not care to know the background information or reasoning to gain a better understanding.

    • In your marketing, you don't always need a logical reason for people to buy from you, just give people any reason.

25. Lollapalooza Tendency: When multiple different biases act in the same direction. Don’t let this happen.

    • In your marketing, bare down multiple biases in customers' brains, and they'll be helpless to buy from you.

Be cautious with these don't use them for evil.

But also understand them and study them so you can avoid making these mental mistakes and you can apply them to your marketing secrets.

There are more biases, but these are the common 25 that come out of Charlie Munger’s book from Monday!

I would recommend trying to study these at least once a month, or just getting his book!

Warren Buffet the billionaire says he never goes to auctions.

Why?

Because they're going to convince you with cognitive biases to buy something you don't need.

Social proof, urgency, scarcity, authority, and availability bias are all presented right in front of you in these auctions.

And this is how the modern world is with constant ads, news, media, and music.

So avoid putting yourself in situations where multiple cognitive biases work against you.

This is called the lollapalooza effect.

As always, hope you enjoyed today’s packed newsletter and have a great weekend, see you on Monday!

Question:

After today, how can you better avoid these biases working against you? Is it consuming less music, and media, going out less to go shopping?

And How can you better add these to your marketing?

Leave a comment below!

P.S. I post daily tweets on frameworks, guidelines, and overall great thought's I learn from mentors ahead of me.

Drop me a follow if you haven’t already, would love to connect!