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Do you know the magic formula to create luck?
An experimenter recruited four hundred people and divided them in two groups based on whether they considered themselves as lucky or unlucky. Each group was given a newspaper and asked to count the number of photographs inside.
The second page of the newspaper contained the message, “Stop counting – There are forty three photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over two inches high. The experimenter even placed a second large message half way through the newspaper. This one announced, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win dollars two hundred and fifty.”
Should there be a performance difference between these two sets of people on this simple task of photograph counting?
Photo Adaptation/Flickr/silveraquarius/
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The mistakes we make in our everyday life
We human beings engage in thinking and decision making in our daily life. It is our ability to solve problems and choose the best course of action, which leads to better outcomes. But we also make systematic errors when we think and at times we don’t even realize. We fail to think clearly because of our emotions such as anger or fear and this leads to wrong decision making as well as avoidable harm.
These systematic errors are known as biases. We can learn, understand to notice these biases within us and around us. Once we know, then we can also take action to avoid these biases, prejudices and beliefs and act to avoid the harm. Biases are systematic and predictable errors we make.
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