This sort of thing is really fascinating. I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow recently, and at the same I've been trying to make a difficult decision between two job offers.
I have been astounded to discover how irrational my thought processes are, even though this is an important choice and I'm consciously trying to avoid instinctive and emotional decisions: I see evidence of halo effects, risk aversion, substituting difficult comparisons for easier ones ("what's the better work environment?" is hard, but "where did I have conversations I liked better?" is easy), and more.
Overall I wouldn't actually recommend trying to learn about cognitive biases in the midst of making an important decision – it's really, really easy to tie yourself up in knots! E.g. "Do I like them better because I interviewed with them more recently (availability heuristic)? Am I making the mistake of preferring the easy certainty of having made up my mind over the discomfort of making a complex choice?"
It's a really cool field of research, though.
Edit: One interesting "hack" the book mentions is how to game feedback. Essentially, we decide how frequent something is by how easily we can call to mind examples of it. However, past about six items, most people will have trouble coming up with examples of anything; however, unless they're aware of this fact, the difficulty of coming up with the later examples can cause them to erroneously think it's not very frequent after all.
So, for example, if a professor in a course evaluation requires students to list 12 ways to improve the course, students will actually rate the course more highly than if they are only asked for three! Evil uses for this are left to the reader's imagination.
On the other hand - I'm impressed or even astounded by how people are able to fumble through life and still end up in good situations and circumstances.
I have been astounded to discover how irrational my thought processes are, even though this is an important choice and I'm consciously trying to avoid instinctive and emotional decisions: I see evidence of halo effects, risk aversion, substituting difficult comparisons for easier ones ("what's the better work environment?" is hard, but "where did I have conversations I liked better?" is easy), and more.
Overall I wouldn't actually recommend trying to learn about cognitive biases in the midst of making an important decision – it's really, really easy to tie yourself up in knots! E.g. "Do I like them better because I interviewed with them more recently (availability heuristic)? Am I making the mistake of preferring the easy certainty of having made up my mind over the discomfort of making a complex choice?"
It's a really cool field of research, though.
Edit: One interesting "hack" the book mentions is how to game feedback. Essentially, we decide how frequent something is by how easily we can call to mind examples of it. However, past about six items, most people will have trouble coming up with examples of anything; however, unless they're aware of this fact, the difficulty of coming up with the later examples can cause them to erroneously think it's not very frequent after all.
So, for example, if a professor in a course evaluation requires students to list 12 ways to improve the course, students will actually rate the course more highly than if they are only asked for three! Evil uses for this are left to the reader's imagination.