ConceptsNest

  We are hard-wired to fight or flee under threat , so it is normal to want to act out in defense when we experience or observe the injustices in today’s world. But when we respond with our primitive, survive mind, it raises the stakes for impulsive and unreasonable reactions and in some cases violence, even death. Our survive brain can colonize our hearts and dwarf our humanity if we continue to allow it—as evidenced by large-scale injustices such as racially motivated murders, hate crimes, violent protests, police brutality, deadly reactions to the COVID-19 lock-down and global terrorism. Survive Mind Versus Thrive Mind We have a choice to permit our lives to be  driven  by our  survive mind’ s violent reactions or  drawn  from our  thrive mind’s   calm, compassionate, and clear-minded actions . Our lives are shaped from the inside out. If we lose our inner connection, in small ways and big, our personal lives and the world unravel. It starts with each of us exercising our own

  ***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: Decision Making, its styles, different Cognitive Biases) Link to Chapter -01 Common Patterns in Decision Making The upside of understanding various patterns in decision-making is that they lead us to think about how the mind preforms its many complex functions in countless situations and how our awareness of time, space, and the various narrative and cognitive frameworks can help decode the factors that shape our decisions. Here is a graphic presentation of what author Venkatesh Rao puts forward in his book. The graphic shows “Information Location” across the x-axis going from Internal to External and “Visibility of Mental Models” on the y-axis going from Low to High. The distinctions among the four classes of basic decision patterns (above) are not arbitrary. They are based on the distribution and visibility of situational information . Information originates either in the decision-maker’s head or in the environment , and we either

  ***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: Cognitive Biases and Debiasing, The Debiasing Process) Link to Chapter 01 Various Debiasing Techniques There are a few general debiasing strategies (sometimes referred to as  cognitive-forcing strategies ), which can help deal with many of the cognitive biases. Many of these strategies are interrelated since the underlying principles behind them are similar. A) Develop awareness of cognitive biases: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .>>   In some cases, simply being aware of a certain bias can help us reduce its impact. For example, consider the  illusion of transparency , a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate how well others can discern their emotional state, so that they tend to think that other people can tell if they are feeling nervous or anxious even in situations where that is not the case. This happens because our own emotional experience can be so strong, we are sure our emotions ‘leak out.’ Howev