(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