Tame your Ape

The discovery of cognitive bias, and its irrational influence on us, is one of the great leaps forward in the science of decision making in the past 50 years. The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated their genius in observing specific, irrational everyday behaviours. If they could repeat and manipulate the behaviours in an experimental setting, they gave it a name. Once they had a name, the behaviour could be explored in a whole new way because we had a brand new set of conceptual keys to unlock new areas of insight.

Loss aversion, status quo bias and sunk cost fallacy are all behavioural constructs that came directly out of their research. More than 350 separate biases have been identified to exist at the time of writing my book Going Apes#!t. Their work opened a whole new world of insight and birthed an entire field of study called behavioural economics. Their revolutionary efforts earned them the Nobel Prize for economics in 2002 and continues to attract accolades more than 50 years after their initial research.

This isn’t the study of the individual differences between “Apes” – our emotional, unconscious and automatic reactivity; this is the study of how irrational all of our Apes can be. As we use the language of cognitive bias, the conceptual keys at our disposal, we can identify many areas of our lives where these irrational biases are influencing