Cognitive Effects That Influence Life and Work
Sometimes, our brains do strange things. They mix up time, make us overestimate our abilities, and lead us to believe all sorts of nonsense. Here are some cognitive effects that can impact your life and work.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
This effect explains why many beginners consider themselves experts, while true professionals often underestimate their abilities. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a distortion in self-assessment. Early successes in a new field can boost self-confidence to unrealistic heights. That’s why novices often lecture more experienced people and don’t realize they’re making mistakes. This can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts at work.
As people gain more experience, they realize how little they actually know and may fall into a “valley of despair.” You probably know people who are great at what they do but constantly downplay their skills—they’re just in that valley. Only after becoming true experts can people realistically assess themselves and look back at their journey with a mix of pride and horror.
The DĂ©jĂ Vu Effect
Everyone is familiar with déjà vu. Is it a glitch in the matrix? Echoes of a past life? In reality, it’s just a brain malfunction that can happen due to fatigue, illness, or changes in the environment. The glitch occurs in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for finding analogies in memory. Essentially, déjà vu happens when the brain finds details in a recent event that it saw, say, a year ago. It then perceives the whole event as something from the distant past, making you feel like you predicted it long ago. In fact, your recent memories are just being replayed as if they’re from the past. You see the same scene twice without realizing it. Why, brain, why?!
The Comfort Zone
Why leave your comfort zone? What’s wrong with living and working in peaceful conditions? It turns out that comfort level is linked to productivity, and unfamiliar situations not only open up new opportunities but also make us work better. Comfort means doing familiar things, facing no challenges, and living a steady life. Anxiety is low, and productivity is just enough for routine tasks.
So why push yourself? In unfamiliar situations, we mobilize all our resources and work harder to return to our comfort zone. This is when we enter the learning zone, where we quickly gain new knowledge and put in more effort. Eventually, our comfort zone expands and absorbs part of the learning zone. The same happens with the learning zone. But does more stress mean we get better? Not exactly. At some point, anxiety becomes so high that we enter the panic zone, where productivity drops. However, as your comfort zone grows, things that once scared you become part of your learning zone, which also expands.
To grow, you need to challenge yourself and learn to handle difficulties.
The Dr. Fox Effect
This effect makes implausible information seem interesting and even educational to an audience. It explains the popularity and persuasiveness of pseudoscientific movements and cults. All it takes is charisma. People are more likely to trust charismatic, entertaining speakers and take their words at face value. When listening to such a person, it’s harder to notice contradictions or illogical statements, and it’s more difficult to objectively assess the value of what’s being said. After the lecture, you might feel like you’ve learned something valuable, even if that’s not the case.
Less charismatic speakers don’t leave as strong an impression, which can make their information seem less important or interesting.
The Paradox of Choice
Having lots of options seems great. But why do we take so long to choose from many options, and then feel dissatisfied with our decision? The truth is, variety not only slows down decision-making but also makes us less happy. People get stuck in front of store shelves, unable to pick a box of pasta. This applies to more than just shopping—any situation with too many choices slows down our decisions.
But that’s not all. Once a choice is made, we’re left with uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Was it the right decision? Maybe another option was better. That guy bought different pasta—does he know something I don’t? In the end, we’re unhappy and frustrated. This wouldn’t happen if there were only five options.
To avoid this effect, limit your choices in advance. For example, buy only farm products or only German-made electronics. And once you’ve made a choice, don’t let doubts get to you. Just because someone else chooses differently doesn’t mean it’s right for you.
The Survivor Bias
Survivor bias is the tendency to draw conclusions about a phenomenon based only on successful cases. For example, you hear a story about someone being pushed to shore by a dolphin and conclude that dolphins are smart and kind. But the person who was pushed the other way can’t tell their story.
This bias makes us repeat the actions of successful people, hoping for the same results. He dropped out of school in 7th grade and is now a millionaire! Great, I should do that too. But think about the thousands who dropped out and didn’t succeed. They don’t give lectures or appear on magazine covers, but knowing about their experiences is just as important to avoid repeating their mistakes.
To survive, you need to know not only about the “survivors” but also about those who didn’t make it, to get the full picture.
Emotional Anticipation
This effect explains why achieving a long-awaited dream sometimes doesn’t bring us joy. It’s because our emotions often get ahead of events. How does it work? Suppose you set a goal to buy a car, set a deadline, and start saving money. The thought of achieving your goal and the positive emotions that will follow keep you motivated.
If you steadily work toward your goal, at some point it becomes clear you’ll succeed. For example, a month before buying the car, you know you’ll have enough money. That’s when you hit an emotional peak—the car is already “in your pocket.”
That’s why, at the moment of purchase, your emotions aren’t at their highest. Sure, you feel something, but it’s not as strong, and sometimes you’re even disappointed. Sometimes, people achieve their biggest goals and then feel like life has lost its meaning. To avoid this, some set goals so big they can only be achieved after death.
The key is to reach the point in life where you know for sure you’ll achieve your goal. That helps avoid disappointment and negative consequences.
The Crab Bucket Effect
Have you ever told friends about your goals (quitting smoking, learning to play the violin, etc.), only for them to talk you out of it? They say it’s pointless, you were fine before, and so on. This is called the crab bucket effect or crab mentality. Observing crabs shows that one crab can escape a bucket, but when there are many, they pull each other down, preventing anyone from escaping. As a result, they all stay in the bucket.
The same happens with people. Subconsciously, they don’t want anyone to change their life, because it means they should consider changing too, and the excuse “everyone lives like this” no longer works. Maybe they also want to quit smoking or learn the violin, but fear, laziness, or something else holds them back.
This doesn’t mean your friends wish you harm. You just reminded them of their own unrealized dreams, which is uncomfortable. So if you’ve decided to do something, don’t listen to such excuses. Get out of the bucket and help your friends do the same.
The Uncanny Valley
We like objects that look human: dolls, robots, stuffed animals. But as the resemblance increases, there comes a point when such objects start to look creepy. This psychological effect is called the “uncanny valley.” When a doll or robot looks very human, we’re ready to accept it as a person. But small inconsistencies in appearance cause anxiety. It starts to seem like the creature in front of us is human, but something is off, so it’s better to avoid it. It gets even worse if the object moves.
People have long tried to create robots that look human, but they still can’t move as naturally as living beings. When we see them, we can’t help but think, “Oh no, it’s not alive, but it moves! What are you?!” Horror movie creators often use this effect to scare us.