Something You Should Know
How Your Biases Are Used Against You & How Top Performers Think -SYSK Choice
28 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What strategy can help you choose the best seat at a table?
Today on Something You Should Know, how to pick the best seat at a group table and why it matters. Then, humans have biases. But maybe you think you're smart, you're objective, you don't have biases.
You might think so, and many of your listeners might think, why do these biases apply to me? I'm a sensible, rational person. Unfortunately, scientific evidence finds it's the opposite, that more knowledgeable and more sophisticated people are more susceptible to these biases.
Also, why you just might want to skip the toothpicks at the next party. And how developing mental toughness improves performance at just about anything.
Chapter 2: How do biases influence our decision-making processes?
I think when you look at the best performers who are sustaining excellence over time, their ability is more along the lines of how are they leveraging their software. Those mental techniques that makes the hardware work.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.
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Chapter 3: What is confirmation bias and how does it affect our beliefs?
And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. And today we're going to start with some very practical advice for a situation I know you've probably been in. And that is, you walk into a room, maybe it's a restaurant or it's a meeting or something, and there's a table and chairs and you wonder, where should I sit? Where's the best place to sit?
Well, here is a strategy for choosing the best seat in a group situation. At a circular table that has four seats around it, It doesn't really matter where you sit. Any seat will do. You can't go wrong. At a four-person square table, sit opposite your least favorite person because conversations tend to work diagonally at that kind of table.
In a six-seated situation, choose the middle of one side. It may be harder to get in and out, but you'll have more conversational options that way. For tables of eight or more, timing's everything.
Chapter 4: What mental toughness techniques do top performers use?
If you arrive first, you'll be expected to file to the end. Maybe not so good. If you're last, you'll probably get the least desirable seat that nobody wants to sit in. Also not good.
Chapter 5: How can understanding biases lead to better decision-making?
So the best strategy is to just stand back and wait for the right moment to make your move and grab a seat. And that is something you should know. While you might think that you are or can be objective about a topic, people have biases. They have beliefs that color their ability to be objective. A lot of the time, it's fine, it doesn't matter, small stakes.
But other times, for big things, it can matter, it does matter. And understanding these biases that are ingrained in all of us can be very illuminating. Here to explain them is Alex Edmonds. He is a professor of finance at London Business School. He has a TED Talk called What to Trust in a Post-Truth World that's been viewed over 2 million times.
And he is author of a book called May Contain Lies, how stories, statistics, and studies explored our biases and what we can do about it. Hi, Alex.
Chapter 6: How can you develop mental toughness like elite performers?
Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. So in broad strokes here, let's start with your explanation of these biases that tend to steer our thinking.
Certainly. So there's two biases that cause us to make mistakes when we're interpreting information, data and evidence. So one of them is confirmation bias. So this is the idea that we have a pre-existing view. And if there's evidence that supports that view, we will latch onto it. We will accept it uncritically, even if the evidence is flimsy.
And then in contrast, if there is some evidence that contradicts our view, we will close our ears to it. We might not even read it or we might read it, but with the view to try to tear it apart. So this means we will only latch onto things that we like and dismiss things that we don't like. Now confirmation bias, that does apply to questions where we have a pre-existing view.
So that might be climate change or immigration or gun control. But what about the set of issues for which there is no pre-existing view? That's where the second bias comes in, which is called black and white thinking. So this is the idea that we view something as being always good or always bad. There is no nuance. So let's give an example. So in the sphere of diet,
We often think that protein is good. We learn in school this builds muscles and repairs you. We also think that fat is bad. It's cool that way because it makes you fat. But what about carbohydrates? We might not have a pre-existing view on that. But Robert Atkins, he went viral because of his Atkins diet, which gave the black and white conclusions that more carbs are always bad.
He had a diet saying, let's avoid all carbs. not just simple carbs and saying that complex carbs are fine. He said avoid all carbs. That played into black and white thinking. That latched on. It went viral because it was so simple.
But notice that if he had had completely the opposite conclusion, if he had said have a diet to eat as many carbs as possible, he might have equally gone viral because that also plays into black and white thinking. We think something is either always good or always bad. We're not predisposed to a particular direction.
Okay, so I get what you say about having these biases, but doesn't a little knowledge fix that? If I now know, if I know the truth about carbohydrates, and then I know the Atkins diet is probably not too healthy, case closed.
You might think so, and many of your listeners might think, why do these biases apply to me? I'm a sensible, rational person. Can't I use my knowledge to overcome these biases?
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Chapter 7: What is the role of self-talk in enhancing performance?
Unfortunately, scientific evidence finds it's the opposite, that more knowledgeable and more sophisticated people are more susceptible to these biases. And so why might that be? It's because of something known as motivated reasoning. So the smarter we are, we can come up with arguments to dismiss evidence that we don't like.
And we can also come up with arguments to support evidence that we do like, even if that evidence happens to be flimsy. As an example, it may well be that there's a study which finds a correlation that we don't like. So if we are a supporter of gun control, we might not like a paper which finds that gun control is associated with higher crime.
But we might say, well, correlation does not imply causation. Maybe there's other factors at play here. Maybe crime would have been even higher had there not been gun control. But we turn off those same critical thinking faculties when we find something that we do like. So we do have knowledge, but we apply it only selectively when it suits us.
Two things can be true at the same time. So in some cases, maybe gun control controls crime, and maybe in other cases, gun control doesn't. I don't think you can make the blanket statement that gun control does or doesn't affect crime.
You absolutely cannot. And this is the problem of black and white thinking. So some of these issues may be nuanced. It might be that gun control works in certain situations, but it doesn't work in others. But if you were to give that message, you're much less likely to be tweeted in 280 characters and go viral.
So something which has a simple message where we say X is true, period, that is what typically sells. So it could be something that Carbs are always bad for your health or waking up at 5 a.m. always improves your productivity. If you give that simple message, that's going to be far more powerful than waking up at 5 a.m. improves your productivity.
So long as you're also eating healthily and exercising daily and able to get in bed before 10 p.m. So that more nuanced message is probably going to be more accurate. But that's not the message that we want to hear, given our biases.
Right. And it sounds like a miserable life, too. I don't want to go to bed at 10 and get up at 5 and just eat vegetables all day. I mean, that would be difficult. So if you take people who have a bias and you explain it to them and you say, this is your bias, does it change them? Does knowing it change them? Or do they say, yeah, I have a bias and too bad?
It actually can. So there are some nice studies which look at trying to overcome this situation. So not just studies highlighting the problem, but studies trying to solve this. And so there were two sets of techniques that they tried. So one set of techniques was just to say to people, be as unbiased as possible when evaluating the information. And that just didn't work.
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Chapter 8: What hidden dangers do toothpicks pose to oral health?
scientifically after an earthquake the the plate tectonics are now resolved it's less likely that there'll be an earthquake in the near future so when something is particularly salient or familiar this has an outsized effect on our decisions so it may well be that a friend says hey i breastfed my child and my child is doing well well it could be that your child would have done well otherwise it could be that you were doing lots of other things
to help your child, such as always being present, like reading to your child and so on. But if it is a particular example that we want to be true, we will believe it and we will isolate this particular case and generalize and extrapolate from it.
Well, it's interesting because everything you say makes perfect sense, and yet it seems that we kind of fight it. Or not fight it, but we just... We do what we do because of the biases we have and it makes people feel good. So there's not a lot of reason to not. And yet there is a lot of reason to not.
Yeah. So these biases, they're often really ingrained with us. They're quite difficult to fight. So they go back to confirmation bias, which we led this chat with. This is the idea that we don't like evidence that contradicts our viewpoint. This is so deeply ingrained in us. And this has been evidence in the following way.
So if you take people, you give them a statement that they know that, you know, they agree with. and then you give them something that contradicts that statement, and you see what happens to their brain by hooking them up to an MRI scanner. If you give a non-political statement, like Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, you give them contradictory evidence, nothing really happens.
But if it is a political statement, like immigration is good for society, you give them some contradictory evidence, then the part of the brain that lights up is the amygdala. That is the same part of the brain that lights up when the tiger attacks you. You go on the defensive. You respond to something that you don't like, like a tiger attack. So this is why it is difficult to overcome biases.
And therefore, those who are able to do this, be this in investment decisions as a shareholder, be this in company decisions as an executive, you are the people who are able to get out of subprime loans before the crisis, make different decisions and get ahead.
So really, no matter how objective you think you are, how able you are to critically evaluate something, we all have these biases. It's really, I think, important for people to understand that and that you can't really escape it But you can try to fight it. I've been speaking to Alex Edmonds. He's an economist, a professor of finance at London Business School.
And he's author of a book called May Contain Lies. How stories, statistics and studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it. He also has a TED Talk that's been viewed over 2 million times called What to Trust in a Post-Trust World. And there's a link to the TED Talk and a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate you coming on today. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Mike.
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