One of my favourite reads–the British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Society’s (BPS) Research Digest–has recently pub­lished its 150th issue. To observe this occa­sion, Digest has asked what twenty-three psy­chol­o­gists still don’t under­stand about them­selves.

I’ve men­tioned a num­ber of the fea­tured psy­chol­o­gists here on Lone Gun­man before,  includ­ing Robert Cial­dini, Ali­son Gop­nik and Richard Wise­man.

As Vaughan notes, many of those con­tribut­ing to the arti­cle “bemoan their inabil­ity to apply their research find­ings to their own life”. An exam­ple of this, that I’m sure many of us can relate to, comes from David Buss: the inabil­ity to ‘over­ride’ our well-known biases (related: the bias blind spot).

One nag­ging thing that I still don’t under­stand about myself is why I often suc­cumb to well-documented psy­cho­log­i­cal biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One exam­ple is my fail­ure at affec­tive fore­cast­ing, such as believ­ing that I will be happy for a long time after some accom­plish­ment (e.g. pub­lish­ing a new book), when in fact the hap­pi­ness dis­si­pates more quickly than antic­i­pated. Another is suc­cumb­ing to the male sex­ual over­per­cep­tion bias, mis­per­ceiv­ing a woman’s friend­li­ness as sex­ual inter­est. A third is undue opti­mism about how quickly I can com­plete work projects, despite many years of expe­ri­ence in under­es­ti­mat­ing the time actu­ally required. One would think that explicit knowl­edge of these well-documented psy­cho­log­i­cal biases and years of expe­ri­ence with them would allow a per­son to cog­ni­tively over­ride the biases. But they don’t.