Ep 173: Let’s Go Bias Hunting

Your brain isn't broken — it's just running very old software on a very modern life. And honestly? For the savanna, it was excellent software. For navigating your inbox, your relationships, and the story you tell yourself about whether you're actually making progress? Less so.

In this episode, we dig into five cognitive biases that quietly shape how you see yourself, make decisions, process hard things, and stay stuck. Not in a "you're fundamentally flawed" way — in a "oh wow, this explains SO much" way. Because these biases aren't signs of weakness or low intelligence. They're universal. Researchers who study them have them. Highly successful people have them. Your most clear-headed friend has them. The difference is just whether you can see them running.

So let's see them.

What you’ll learn on this episode: 

• Expectation bias — Your brain is basically a hypothesis-confirming machine. Whatever you already believe about a situation (or yourself), it will dutifully find evidence for. This is why you can walk into the same meeting with different expectations and come out with completely different interpretations of what happened. We talk about how this shows up in self-perception specifically — and how our expectations about ourselves can become the very filters that make them feel true.
• Attribution bias — This one is a whole family of related tendencies, and it explains so much conflict and self-criticism. The short version: we judge other people by their character and ourselves by our circumstances (when things go wrong) — and then flip it when things go right. There's also a sneaky cousin called hostile attribution bias, where we interpret ambiguous behavior from others as intentionally unkind. Spoiler: they probably just had a bad morning.
• Negativity bias — The one that causes the most unnecessary suffering, full stop. Your brain is structurally wired to weight negative experiences roughly twice as heavily as positive ones. One critical comment, one bad day, one public stumble — and your nervous system is taking notes in permanent marker while your wins get written in pencil. This isn't a mindset problem. It's evolution. And once you understand it, you can actually do something about it (hello, proof practice).
• Status quo bias — Why do we stay in situations that aren't working? Why does change feel so risky even when staying is also a risk? This bias is the culprit. Your brain frames the current state as neutral and any change as loss — which means inertia gets disguised as wisdom. We talk about the one question that cuts right through it.
• The availability heuristic — You judge how likely or true something is based on how easily you can think of an example. Vivid, recent, emotionally charged things feel more real — which means your most memorable failures feel like better predictors of your future than your quieter wins. We break down why this matters for how you tell your own story.

All five of these biases share a throughline: your brain is optimizing for survival and efficiency, not for accuracy, growth, or joy. The work isn't to fight it — it's to develop a real relationship with it. To learn its patterns. And to build the practices that help you work with your neurology instead of being unconsciously run by it.

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• All Things Marie on LinkTree

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hi, my friends. How are you today? Welcome to episode number 173 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. It's kind of a cool day today. I drove my son, who is nine, up to Julian and dropped him off with a bunch of his classmates for his first sleepaway trip. They're there for three days and they're all there, no parent chaperones. And they're nine years old, and this is the big, like first independence move. Every year they take these field trips that increase in independence. And this is the first one. So it was really exciting because I got to drive a gaggle of nine-year-olds up that were so bubbly with anticipation and some car sickness because that is a windy road. And I got to drop them off, and they are there. And the wildest thing that happened is that my husband is also on a surf trip right now with his best friends. And my daughter happens to be on a slumber party. And so I have this random night in my week where I'm alone. I am always with people. I'm always with my family. And after recording this podcast, I'm gonna like decide what I want to do. Do I want to go to a yoga class? Do I want to do a hike? Do I want to watch a show? It's read a book. I don't even know. This never happens to me. Do I want to paint? We'll see. Maybe I'll update you next week, or maybe you'll never know. But I'm kind of excited about this and very excited for the experience that my child is having in his first sleepaway trip. All right, y'all. Well, today we are talking about something that I really love studying and thinking about. And that is our bias. And the reason that I love thinking about this and studying it is because it kind of feels like how I felt when I was in college taking philosophy classes and studying about logical fallacies. I don't know if any of you, you know, studied the red herring or the slippery slope or the straw man. There's like all of these logical fallacies that are really interesting to study because they you start to see how your brain plays tricks on you as you're using logic. And it reminds me of how that felt, learning about these logical fallacies, as I've learned over the years about the way that our brain conserves energy through our bias. And I have been seeing these come up in my clients over and over again lately. And of course, I see them in myself over the years. And what I've noticed is that they are incredibly helpful to know about. Because when you know about them and when you consider them as this game that you're playing, this playful little thing that you can apply to your brain and your life, you start to see them more. And as you see them more, you can ask yourself questions to diminish how active your bias is in the results of your life. So I'm gonna teach you these five different ways that our bias might impact putting our idea out into the world and making it a real thing, right? So if you have an idea that you're trying to make real, or if you have a change you're trying to make to your life, or your habits, your daily habits, or your relationships, or you know, adventure, whatever it is, I want you to listen to this episode and think about where does your brain play these tricks on you? Because we all do it. Okay, so let's make this episode fun because I like to gamify everything. So, what we're gonna do is I'm gonna tell you a story, like a little tiny mini story for each one of the five biases that I chose to tell you about today. And I want you to try to see what the fallacy is there. Like what is the bias at play that I'm describing in the situation? Okay. So, first, before we get into the individual biases, I want to give you a little context that's gonna make everything else make a little bit more sense. So, your brain, your beautiful, extraordinary, miraculous three-pound organ, is not primarily a truth-seeking machine. That's not, that's not like what it's most interested in. It's not really looking for the truth. It's a prediction machine. Its number one job is to keep you alive and to conserve your energy. Okay, so that's what your brain is trying to do all the time. And the way that it does that is by building little models of the world, little shortcuts, little patterns, little expectations. It makes me think of my son's Lego collection. Like these little models of the things that he's seen, you know? Little models inside your brain of everything that your brain has experienced. And it builds these models so it doesn't have to process every single piece of incoming information as you're experiencing the world, as you're walking around out there. It doesn't have to like experience it all from scratch and understand it from scratch. It could be like, okay, well, I've seen this before, it matches this, and it conserves a lot of energy. And this is wildly efficient. We would not be very effective at all. I mean, we couldn't exist without bias, honestly. We would not be effective at all. And it works great a lot of the time, but a lot of those shortcuts also create systematic errors. And some of those are really predictable. They're errors that researchers have cataloged and named, and that once you know about them, you can start seeing them everywhere. So let it be fun. Gamify it, baby. Start looking for them everywhere. You can look for them when you're watching a show and you're seeing the characters. You can look for them in other people, but I more recommend that you look for them in yourself. So I'm gonna walk you through five today. And I'm gonna be honest, by the time we're done, you might feel a little exposed. Like, oh no, I do that. I do that a lot. And that's okay. Remember the whole beginning of this that I just told you about. Your brain is actually built to do this. You have to do this in order to survive and exist in the world. And that's actually the point of your brain is to make it easy for you to exist. So don't worry about the fact that your brain does this. And just notice where is it helping you and where is it holding you back? So the way we're gonna do this is I'm gonna gamify it, right? By telling you this little story, you're gonna try to figure out what is the fallacy there, what's the bias that's at play. And then I'm gonna tell you a question that you can ask yourself to try to expose that bias. You with me? All right, what is our first one here? Let me go to my little notes. All right. So you go into a meeting with potential investors because you have this idea for a business and you're like really excited about it on your own. You think like this is the thing that I was born to do. This is where, you know, my passion meets the world's need. There's such a big need for this, and you're you've built this whole business and you're going in to have a meeting with investors. And as you go in, you start to meet some of the other people around you that are going to present to the investors, and you start to think their ideas are so much more researched. Their ideas sound so much more impressive than mine. They look like their outfits are so much more polished than mine. And you start noticing all of these things around you, and you start to think, I am not going to be very impressive. The investors are not gonna want to invest in mine because of all of these other people that I see around me. You start to believe that as you present, the investors are not gonna be interested in what your business model actually is as you present. So you go in and you're really nervous and you kind of stutter, and then you downplay the business. You kind of talk about how it's really young, you're a little self-deprecating, you talk about how it hasn't been around for that long, and you present in a way that kind of keep it short because you don't really think that that is gonna go anywhere, right? What do you think is happening here? What they call this is expectation bias, and we experience it all of the time. It's the tendency to perceive and interpret the information that we that's coming at us as we walk around the world in a way that confirms what we already expect to be true. So our brain is filtering all of the data coming in through the world through the lens of what we anticipate. And we unconsciously favor evidence that matches the story our brain is already telling us. This is why I use the term all of the time thought prophecies, because the thoughts that we repeatedly think, I also call these beliefs the ones that we think over and over again, filter reality. We only pay attention to what matches what we already think, and then we act in a way that is in line with what we already believe and get results that match what we believe, and that confirms our beliefs and strengthens that expectation. So we see this all over the place. We're going into a hard conversation with someone, with a partner, a coworker, and we we expect it to go badly. We walk in tents and then we interpret their tones as cold, and the conversation goes badly. Or you're having a bad hair day, or you don't like the way your clothes look on you. So you keep interactions with people short, you interpret their facial expressions, their tone, their eye contact as being about what you look like instead of about what they are 90% more likely to be thinking about, which is themselves, the day they had, whatever's going on for them. But because you're not acting engaging, they don't engage with you and you say, see, I look weird. They didn't want to talk to me because I look weird, because my hair is all messy and weird, or because my clothes look bad. So you're getting evidence all the time, collecting it for what you already believe. If you think you're not going to be good at something, managing money, public speaking, relationships, and every little time you get even a little bit of confirming evidence, which we are going to get as we learn new things, that belief about yourself will lock in a little bit more. And anytime you get some piece of information that contradicts the story you tell yourself, you're gonna explain it away. I just got lucky that time. That didn't really count. So the reason this matters so much for making our ideas real is that our expectations about ourselves and the people around us become our filters for reality and they keep us confirming the expectations we already have. They shape what we notice, what we remember, and what we believe is possible. So this is number one expectation bias. And the question we can ask ourselves when we're trying to uncover the way this bias is impacting our life is what am I expecting? And is that expectation running ahead of the actual evidence? Am I expecting this person to be like this and so I only see evidence of that? Am I expecting myself to be bad at this, so that's all that I see? Am I expecting this to not go well? Am I expecting it to fail? Am I expecting there to be no job opportunities so I'm not looking that hard? We could see it everywhere once we begin to look. All right, bias number two. This one's really, really interesting, and I see it everywhere. It's a whole family of related tendencies. I'm gonna break it down because I I really think it explains so much conflict in relationships, in teams, in our own heads. So here's the example. We can all relate to this. We are in a text exchange with someone, and we don't text them back for a while. So there's a gap between when they send us a text and when we text them back. And the way we explain that is that we were just really busy. We had a really busy day because we had for myself, I will have back-to-back clients, then I'll go and pick up my kids, and then my kids, you know, I'm trying to focus on them and I am running errands, and then I'm home cooking dinner, and then I'll sit down and return texts, or the next day, even. Sometimes it takes me a few days because my schedule sometimes gets really busy. So I'll explain that to myself as well. I was just engaged the entire time. I was very busy. Somebody else doesn't text us back, and we think we're not important to them, they're avoiding us, they don't care about us, they don't like us. What does your brain do when someone doesn't text you back? So, attribution bias is about how we explain our behavior and other people's behavior. The pattern goes like this: when other people do something, especially something that affects us negatively, we explain it by who they are: their character, their intentions, their personality. She's so selfish. He never thinks about anybody else. They don't care. So think about someone that you might do that with. Here's the funny thing about this bias. When we do something, especially something we're not proud of, we explain it by the circumstances. I was having a terrible week. Nobody told me. I didn't have what I needed, I was busy. So that's a very specific version of attribution bias. It's called fundamental attribution error. And it's so deeply human that even when we know about it, we keep doing it. So it's important with this one to ask ourselves pretty commonly in our review of the day: are we being kinder to ourselves in what we assume in terms of causality than how we're being for other people? Okay, here's another version of attribution bias called hostile attribution bias. I think this one's really interesting too. It's the tendency to interpret actions from others as intentionally hostile. So if someone doesn't respond to your message, like we talked about, they're ignoring you. If someone gives you really feedback, but it's kind of brief, they're dismissing you. If someone doesn't smile when you walk in, they're mad at you. If a car cuts you off, they're rude instead of maybe in a hurry and trying to get somewhere. Our nervous systems are wired to scan for threats. And sometimes that scanner fires on ambiguity and calls it hostility when everybody is out there having a full day full of all kinds of things and everybody has a reason for how they're acting. So the question we can ask ourselves around attribution bias is what situation might be shaping this person's behavior that I can't see? And for ourselves and for other people, we can say, is this really a character issue, or might there be a circumstance here for myself or for someone else? Am I being fair to myself? Am I assuming the best in someone else? All right. Bias number three, and many of you have heard of this before. Okay, let's say there's a circle of appreciation. Maybe at work, maybe at a gathering where people are kind of just thanking each other, saying what they really appreciate about one another. There's a bunch of positive words that are said about many different people. And let's say one individual hears like five different things about themselves because there's this recognition, appreciation period that's going on where people are kind of sharing positive words with each other. And maybe I hear five things about myself that are positive things that other people experienced in me that are really wonderful. And I also, earlier that day, had an interaction with someone where they made a joke that seemed like it was kind of taking a dig at me. That night, my brain is gonna focus on that one thing that one person said that felt like a dig on me. What kind of bias do you think this is? This is the one that I think causes the most unnecessary suffering in our life. It's negativity bias. It's the tendency for negative experiences, information, and emotions to hit much harder and stick longer than positive ones. Even when the positive ones are objectively bigger, or in the example I just gave, they're just actually objective, right? So when someone cracks a joke and we take it personally and it feels like it might be a dig, that's totally subjective. We're that's in our head. But what someone actually says out loud to us, these words of appreciation, that's objective. They're telling us they appreciate us, but our brain is still gonna focus on the story we made about something negative. One critical comment undoes five compliments. One bad day colors a whole good week in your memory. One failure echoes in your head for years, while a hundred wins slip away and we don't even pay attention to them. The reason that we're like this is not because there's something wrong with us. This was actually an evolutionary development. For our ancestors on the savannah, missing a threat was potentially fatal, right? If we didn't threat scan and find something that was dangerous to us, we could die. And missing an opportunity was just a missed opportunity. So the brain developed a threat detection system that airs dramatically on the side of caution. It gives negative experiences, what researchers call negativity dominance. They're weighted roughly twice as heavily as equivalent positive experiences. That's one of the pieces of research I found. I've also heard for every four positive comments, one negative comment will outweigh it. I have also read for every nine positive comments, we'll still focus on the one negative. So there's lots of different thoughts about this and different research that show different actual figures in this. But what we know is that our brain is heavily, heavily weighted towards negativity. The one that I have read and researched the most is that we have a general 80% negativity bias. So it this means that we have to intentionally amplify our wins just to register them at the same level as any kind of failure or any negativity. So your brain is not giving your progress and your struggles equal air time. It is structurally biased toward the struggles. So think about the implications of this and how we remember the past. The hard things have probably taken up more narrative real estate in your brain than they deserve. What about in how we process feedback? One critique lands like this boulder while a handful of praise just floats away like it never even happened. Or maybe think about how you think about your own growth. So many of my clients don't recognize all the ways that they're growing and growing and growing and growing. It feels like nothing's changing, not because nothing is changing, but because the setbacks are more vivid than the incremental progress. So then when we sit down and we look and I have them tell me all the ways that they've made progress, their minds are blown. They're like, what the heck? Why did I think things weren't going well? I just had this tiny little setback and I have come so, so, so far in the last two weeks. They laugh at themselves, but it's a real thing we have to do because our brain is going to focus on just the negativity all the time. So you have to deliberately interrupt that negativity bias, not by pretending the hard things aren't hard, but by practicing finding proof, an intentional habit of noticing and documenting the ways you're growing, your wins, your shifts, evidence of change, evidence of things you're doing well, things that are going well. It's not artificial. Positivity, it's literally balancing out what your brain is wired to do because your brain is wired for the negative. So here's the question you can ask yourself Is this actually as bad as it feels, or is my mind being a threat detector and it's doing its job just a little too enthusiastically? What are all the things that are going well? Okay, so that's a question you can ask yourself. All right, two more. Okay, so here's our next one, and I'm gonna share a ridiculous thing from our morning as a family that was happening for a while. All right, our family did the same thing every morning. And my husband got up at the same time, I got up super early, and then my husband got up at the same time, and he would wake up my son at the same time every morning. And then we would make our coffee and we would go through our whole practice of making breakfast for our kids, cleaning up the dishes, and every morning we were about five minutes later than we wanted to be. We didn't get to school late, but we were just a little rushed, and some of us were ready and the other ones weren't. And it just created like a very unnecessary tension because everything was just a little bit rushed at the end of the morning. I'm gonna add to that that as I poured my coffee, I continuously had this habit of drinking this coffee with a lot of oat milk in it that just was delicious and I loved it. And I knew it was not great for me because it is not the best way to start the day. I wasn't starting my day with protein. I know all about blood sugar, and I got into this habit of just drinking this coffee because it tasted really good. And there are so many other ways that you can have coffee that tastes really good, but I was just really in the habit of drinking it, and we were really in the habit of getting up at this time and then all we were being rushed every day. And even though it would have been so easy to switch up my coffee routine or to get my son up 10 minutes earlier, have my husband get up 10 minutes earlier, we just kept doing the same thing and having the same struggle. This is called the status quo bias. This is the one that keeps people stuck. Status quo bias is the preference for the current state. Any change from what we're doing already feels a little bit risky. Your brain frames change as loss and frames the status quo as neutral. So even when the current situation isn't working, leaving the current situation triggers loss aversion. So another way to think about this is the discomfort of staying is familiar. The discomfort of changing is unknown. And the brain wants to conserve energy, it wants to be able to predict things, it almost always prefers the familiar discomfort over the unknown one. And this shows up in the big obvious ways, a job that's draining and you don't like, staying in a relationship that stopped working, staying in a city that never quite felt right. How can you relate to this one? And then, of course, it shows up in the small ridiculous ways like having too much oat milk and my coffee or not getting up 10 minutes earlier, right? The way we've run our morning. So the status quo bias is why when we've always done something one way, we keep doing it that way. So here's the question we can ask ourselves. If I weren't already doing it this way, what would I do? Or if I weren't already in this situation, what would I choose to be in? Would I choose to be in this situation, or would I choose something different? All right, last one. So you're going along and you feel great about your relationship, and then all of a sudden you hear your friend talk about how hard her divorce is. She's going through a divorce and it came out of nowhere, and she had no idea that she thought her relationship was actually going great, and all of a sudden, her partner asked her for a divorce, and it really took her by surprise, and things have gotten really difficult. So all of a sudden, you get really nervous about your own relationship, and you think, oh my gosh, maybe this is gonna happen to me. The likelihood of me being able to stay in a relationship long term that stays really healthy. Oh no, I don't know if this is gonna work. Okay, another example of this is you talk to a customer, you think that everyone is pretty happy, your product's really great, or your service is really great, you're doing great, and then you talk to a customer that's really unhappy, and all of a sudden you think, oh my gosh, maybe everybody's unhappy. Maybe this is really indicative of how a lot of people feel. I should really do some damage control. All right, this is called availability heuristic. It's mistaking what's easy to remember for something that is likely to be true. It's a mental shortcut where you judge how likely or how common something is based on how easily an example comes to mind. So if it's easy to recall something, to remember it, if it feels it feels common and it feels real and it feels like it might happen. But if it's hard to recall, it feels rare or unlikely or distant. It's not actually predictive. So if something's easy to remember, it doesn't actually mean it's more common. Memory's not a filing system that works like that. It's more about how extreme a situation is in our head or how recently we've heard about it. Okay. So if a plane crash dominates the news for a week, we might be really afraid of riding in planes, or if there's like a shark attack in the news, we might not want to swim in the ocean for a long time, but we're super comfortable getting in our cars. Cars are way more likely to cause us harm than planes or sharks. But because we've read about that and it's in our head and it scared us, we are way more afraid of that than of getting in our car. Or if a friend has a difficult divorce, marriage feels riskier, right? That was my example. Or if you read about a rare disease, suddenly you might feel like you have it, or you might be really careful about whatever that specific danger is, washing your vegetables three times or whatever this thing is, right? Or someone has a failure, maybe that really was hard for them. Maybe they tried something big and it didn't work, or they were rejected or embarrassed, and that memory is burned into their head. So even years later, they don't want to try it again. Because that memory is salient for them. So it is why the availability heuristic is why your worst moments feel more true than your best ones. Not because they are, but just because they're louder in your head. So the question we can ask ourselves is is this easy to think about because it's actually common or because it's vivid or recent or emotionally charged? All right. Do you like our little logic test? Do you like our little bias gamify finder? What was that like for you? We've covered five biases today. Expectation bias, you see what you're already looking for. Attribution bias, you assign blame and credit in systematically unfair ways. Negativity bias, the hard things hit harder and stick longer than the good ones. Status quo bias. Staying feels safe even when staying costs you. Or the availability heuristic. This is vivid and recent, feels like true and likely. Your brain is optimizing for survival and efficiency, but not for accuracy or growth or joy. Okay. Our brain is not looking for truth. It's just looking to be efficient. And that's what it evolved to do. So as we understand this, we can start to see, as we name these biases, we can start to look for them. So your one thing to take with you this week is choose one or two of these. Pick one of the biases that landed the strongest, the one you recognized in yourself. And for the next week, just notice it. Don't beat yourself up. Try to be charmed by your brain, or at least, you know, think of it as funny. You can do it with someone. You can go bias hunting with somebody and tell each other about the biases that you're seeing. And just name it. Oh, there's my negativity bias. There's my brain preferring the status quo again. And just as you name it, it will create a little bit of distance. And the distance helps you. It that pause helps you make a different choice. All right. So if any of this landed for you, I'd love to hear about it because our bias is kicking all the time. Yours and mine. I love to look for them. So reach out to me, tell me what bias you're hearing, you're seeing, and yourself. And if you want to go any deeper on any of this, we do this kind of work inside the Bloom Room every single week. We have new people in there. It's really fun right now. Um, and we'd love to invite more. You can join anytime. That's my ongoing community and coaching space for everybody, the Bloom Room. And then the Moxie Mastermind is a six-month coaching program for women making ideas real, who want to do it and have fun and be in the company of women. So come on and join us. And otherwise, have fun bias hunting. That's what I've got for you this week. And I will see you next week. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.