is obvious: speed up the work, if necessary by frequently cursing out the individual causing the slowdown.
CORRECTING FOR OUR OWN BIASES
As we have just seen, it is possible consciously to correct for a bias in yourself that you have noticed—in that case, negating intended behavior associated with mishaps in ongoing behavior. Sometimes you can correct your biases quantitatively. For example, I long ago noticed that when asked for my straight-from-the-heart, no-thinking estimate of a variable, I tended to overshoot by 30 percent in the positive direction. So when I wanted to know the approximate truth, I just subtracted 30 percent from my first estimate.
Consider another example. In which order do you search for something? Do you start first with the most likely place to find it and then search each successive place in descending order of likelihood? Or do you do it the other way around—start with the least likely and move up? The only rational system is the first—you minimize costs by always searching where the expected returns are highest—but most of my life I have done it exactly the other way around. Why? I believe it may have been a response to relatively harsh paternal reaction when I failed to turn up with what I had been sent to find. If you are very fearful as you set out to search for something, you may be tempted to start with the last place you would expect to find it—having eliminated this, you then move to a more hopeful alternative, and so on. Your mood goes right up until the very last choice, whereas in the rational search, you try your best shot first. If it fails, you start to panic; as each succeeding one fails, your panic grows. In one situation, hope grows; in the second, panic. Whatever the cause of my aberrant behavior, I see the pattern and how foolish it is, so I act consciously to counteract the bias, forcing my brain to focus first on the most likely place to find what is missing and then move steadily down from there. Yet my very first move is often still in the wrong direction, and only then does the correction set in.
I also noticed a curious fact about my mind where arithmetic is concerned. I grew up before calculators and I learned numerous tricks to solve arithmetic problems quickly. But if you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers, my mind short-circuited. I added when I should have subtracted, multiplied when I should have divided. I had to remove the dollar signs and reinsert them only at the end. I also had to proofread my work more carefully. When you are copying a long number and want to make sure you have made no mistakes, you can read through the numbers again, comparing them directly, but the better way is to read through them backward. That way, unconscious mental biases that may prevent you from seeing the error twice in a row are very unlikely to do so. Professional proofreaders often use the same device.
Another example of noticing a pattern of behavior and acting consciously against it concerns displacement activities. It is a fact of human (and monkey) psychology that aggression is easily displaced onto others. Angry with your spouse, you may be harder on your children or kick the dog, often to their surprise. It is as if your anger is incited and, looking around for targets, is blocked from the logical one, so it looks for nearby victims, preferably those smaller and less able to retaliate. This is such a common occurrence that everyone sees it coming, including me, and yet often, as before, the initial impulse is to indulge the anger, even if shortly following it with contrition and apology.
WHY ARE WE SO COMPULSIVE?
Why do we repeat ourselves so often? Why do we have compulsions that reappear despite our every effort to suppress them? Why do we have lifelong arguments inside ourselves that hardly change and are never resolved? Why no learning? The details differ from case to case, but I believe that genetics is almost always involved.
As much as 60 percent of all our genes are active in the human brain, the most genetically diverse tissue in our body (see Chapter 6). Thus we expect enormous genetic variation affecting behavior, including deceit and self-deception. This means we may often differ one from one another psychologically on genetic grounds alone, with no environmental or social rhyme or reason accessible to us.