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MathiasZaman comments on Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014 - Less Wrong
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In a conversation on tumblr it recently came up that learning and doing a couple of exercises on the Sunk Cost Fallacy did not prevent people from committing it. Similarly, in Thinking: Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman describes students not adjusting their beliefs about humans after learning about the Bystander Effect.
Learning about biases obviously isn't enough, but are there known tricks for better dealing with them after learning about a specific bias?
As far as I know we can categorise known biases in three categories: Those that we don't know how to deal with, those where merely knowing them is enough and those where some exercise or action helps to deal with them.
I think lukeprog had a post on the two latter categories. Trying to find it.
Also you could contact CFAR, they do this kind of stuff. Though they might be unwilling to share their untested material.
Edit: This article by by crazy88 and this article by lukeprog should get you started.
Thanks a lot!
Please keep me/us updated if you continue researching.
I've experienced not being able to adjust for biases in real emotionally-charged situations, even after knowing about them. However, after reflecting on those real life situations and deciding what I should have done, I found that it became easier to notice them in the future. And after successfully noticing when biases are at play in emotionally charged circumstances and making the rational decision, I've gotten even better at it.
For example, I had the sunk costs fallacy bite me really hard in a situation with an ex-girlfriend. But after finally looking at it in those terms and making the rational decision, I was happier which gave me positive reinforcement.
I suspect that applying your knowledge of biases in high-stakes or emotionally-charged situations makes it easier to do so in the future. So maybe try starting with doing retrospectives or postmortems and then build up from there.
(Of course there's always the possibility that I'm no better at it at all and I just think I am because of the availability bias... but I don't think so)
Transfer of learning is the more general keyword that's relevant here: getting knowledge that has been taught in one context to transfer to different contexts and actually become widely applicable is a difficult task in general.