Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement

Psychology of Mistakes: 7 Lazy Thinking Habits You Don't Notice You Have

Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement

Show Notes

Human beings, it turns out, are magnificently good at fooling themselves.

Sadly the mind has developed an elaborate way of hiding our worst thinking mistakes from us. Our shortcut-taking so instinctive we rarely notice it happening.

This episode explores seven of these habits and on the way answers a lot of questions. Why do we blame the referee and ignore our own missed shots? Why does a friend's anecdote beat a mountain of statistics? Why do the people who commit history's worst atrocities rarely think of themselves as villains?

I find it oddly comforting discovering that everyone, including myself, is quietly wired / weird this way. Hopefully you do to and can learn to start working around it.

Catch yourself assigning blame to one convenient cause

Ask what a friend's story leaves out that the statistics reveal

Notice when certainty feels good but the evidence is thin

Listen in, and you may never trust your first instinct quite the same way again.

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Sam Webster explores the psychology of happiness, satisfaction, purpose, and growth through the lens of self-improvement.

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Chapters

00:00 Benefits of thinking hard thoughts00:52 Developing ourselves and our thinking01:12 Optimizing for the wrong things02:45 Doubting takes time and energy03:39 The 7 biggest flaws of lazy thinking06:35 Single cause explanations to complex events08:52 Justifying your own actions while judging others11:52 Tangent on the book Evil14:01 Your field of vision isn't everyone else's17:45 Prioritizing stories over statistics20:26 Outsourcing hard decisions to experts23:47 Overconfidence25:59 Annie Duke and thinking in bets28:00 Accepting probability and reality29:11 Outro

Topics discussed

Why humans default to lazy thinking instead of doing the harder mental work

How rushing t

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