Cognitive Biases: The GI Joe Fallacy
About this video
Laurie Santos explains the GI Joe fallacy: the mistaken belief that simply knowing about a bias is enough to overcome it. Knowing helps with facts like multiplication tables, but for biases most of our behaviour is controlled by habits and situations, so shaping our situations and regulating emotions matter more than knowledge alone.
You'll be able to
- explain what the GI Joe fallacy is and where its name comes from.
- tell apart cases where knowing helps (facts) from cases where knowing isn't enough (biases).
- explain why shaping our situations and habits can work better than just knowing about a bias.
Key words
- GI Joe fallacy
- The mistaken belief that knowing about a bias is enough (at least 'half the battle') to stop it affecting us.
- Fallacy
- A mistaken belief or faulty piece of reasoning.
- Anchor
- A number we see first that pulls our later judgment towards it, like 'five for five dollars'.
- Habit
- Something we do automatically, often without conscious thought.
Transcript
(intro music) Hi! my name is Laurie Santos. I teach psychology at Yale University, and today I want to talk to you about the GI Joe fallacy. This lecture is in the series on cognitive biases. If you've watched a bunch of these videos, you've probably gotten a bit better at noticing your biases at work, and knowing that you might fall prey to them.
You might also think that knowing about your biases would, naturally, make you less susceptible to them. Unfortunately, it's not always that simple. In fact, if you think knowing your biases is all you need to overcome them, then you'd be falling prey yet another bias: the GI Joe fallacy.
If you're a child of the nineteen-eighties, then you might have a guess about where the name from this bias comes from. Yes - it's from that cartoon known as "GI Joe." Maybe you remember how these shows ended. Each episode had a sort of cheesy public service announcement that ended with the show's famous epithet: "Now you know, and knowing is half the battle."
The problem with this idea, the idea that knowing is half the battle, is that cognitive science has shown us that merely knowing about our biases is often way less than half the battle. Now, there are certainly some cases where knowing is half the battle: Knowing your multiplication tables, for example, or knowing which aisle the milk is in.
But there are many more where it's not the case, cases where just knowing something doesn't really help us all that much. For example, you may know that standing on the Grand Canyon Skywalk is perfectly safe, but your mind will still feel like it's pretty scary.
You may know that arbitrary anchors can mess up your final judgment, but you'll still feel like it's best to get five chocolates when you see a "five for five dollars" sign. Finally, you may know that different wordings can affect your intuitions, but you still may be more hesitant to take a risk involving lives lost than lives saved using years of research on cognitive bias he's shown them know him recognizing yourself as having information is only a small part of what controls our behavior indeed indeed situations most of our behavioral control comes from other classes you like our habits with the situations we finders and not from our conscience tells this is why shaping our situations another behavior in the right direction or even just
learning to regulate your emotions over time to be really powerful the funniest part of the GI Joe fallacy is that even knowing about it and the fallacy would protect is less than half the battle even if you know knowing is half the battle you still have a tendency to think that way you consciously know is a mean thing that controls your behavior but it's not even if you watch all of these videos you're still going to be subject to the same effects that the videos described for most cognitive biases including the GI Joe Kraus knowing is not even half the battle and so now you know and that's less than half the battle Subtitles by the Amara.org community
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