In my last post, I brought up the topic of cognitive biases-which are a fancy way of describing our ability to lie to ourselves. Specifically, I was examining the case of quarterback Kurt Warner.
Warner displayed a bias known as anchoring-meaning our tendency to make critical decisions based on one lone piece of information (a frequent example of this bias is people who buy used cars after reading the odometer but while ignoring all other sources of information).
Warner ‘s anchor was that ‘he was a more accurate quarterback than Brett Farve. Unfortunately, at the time he reached this conclusion, he had no pro starts and only a year of college ball under his belt. Meanwhile Farve was one year away from winning his first Superbowl and his first MVP award.
And therein lies the rub.
Warner's anchor was fictive, as was his resulting over-confidence. But this over-confidence served its purpose. Warner's cognitive bias became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, Warner become a more accurate passer than Farve (which helps explain why the Arizona Cardinals will today play in the Superbowl).
The question I raised but did not answer was how was it that Warner's bias bore fruit based, as it was, on completely erroneous information. Turns out this is exactly how biases are supposed to work-especially in men.
Roy Baumeister has argued that men are more evolutionarily dispensable than women. If you were to cut the world's male population in half, the only real effect this would have on our species-provided we could overcome our predilections against bigamy- is that those men left alive would end up having even more sex.
Cut the world's population of women in half and the results are a disaster.
This shows up in evolution as well. Since men are evolutionarily dispensable, nature has a tendency to experiment more with them. This explains why there are far more male geniuses and male retards than female.
It also explains why, historically-and only until the advent of the airplane and the 20th century discovery of the military worth of civilian targets-men went off to fight wars and women stayed at home.
This also effects personality. Historically, 80 percent of all women procreate and only 40 percent of all men do. Baumeister contends that the men who get lucky are the ones with greater visibility. Men have to stand out to attract women-which is why they're built to take risks.
In 1988 Daly and Wilson added to this argument when they realized that risk taking both increased men's access to resources and their access to mating opportunities-which means not only are men built for risk, but it's also sexually selected character trait.
Evolutionary psychologists use this to explain why 83 percent of all arrests for violent crime (and 89.2 percent of all arrests for murder) are men.
Cognitive psychologists argue that the urge to take risks needs to be based on something and in many cases this something is the result of our biases.
As my fellow blogger and MIT's Director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (maybe the best institutional name around) recently pointed out in a conversation: "Realism can be over-rated. And over-confidence can often be a great thing. Look at the information surrounding restaurants. All the data shows that most fail, but entrepreneurs ignore this repeatedly. Their biases are doing exactly what they're supposed to do-convincing them to bet it all even when they shouldn't."
Warner's success in football was based on exactly this type of self-deception. And in his case too, that deception paid big dividends. Which is ultimately why we have these biases in the first place-because evolution always bets the long shot.
