As mentioned, anchoring, like all psychological ploys, exploits a blind spot in System 1. In a context where there are few references, any new one will have a huge biasing effect—we seem to need an anchor, any anchor, to cling on to. Hence, when my client says, “We...
I’ll give a couple more examples of blindspots that can be exploited by manipulators. Our brains find statistics confusing. Let’s take a study of indidence of kidney cancer in the 3,141 US counties The counties in which the rates are lowest are in rural, sparsely...
Another commonly-exploited blindspot is called “Availability”. When something comes easily to mind, that type of thing seems more likely. For example, after a big plane crash, people get nervous about flying … though it’s no more or less risky than before the crash....
You may be interested – or perhaps horried – to know that our System 1’s have a lot of exploitable blindspots. Some of them are listed here. I recommend reading Kahneman’s book, or related information on Nudge theory, in order to improve your ability to recognise the...
Meta-communication is frequently the answer. This means discussing the process being used for a conversation, rather than its content. In other words, it is the technique of talking about a conversation at a level above who said what. For example: In response to “It’s...
