EMBARRASSING CORRECTION: My Covid and My Cognitive Biases

I wrote: “Or, back to gambling, you’re at the blackjack table and you have a sixteen against the dealer’s king. You have a “feeling” that you should take another card, even though the laws of probability and math scream against it. You ignore the screams and hit. You get a five and win the hand. You decide that from now on, you’re going to listen to your instinct, the math be damned. “

I got the math and the odds exactly backwards. You should always hit with a sixteen against the dealer showing a seven or better.  A bit of brain fog? In any case, no excuses for my error!

Almost three years of behavior somewhere on the frontier between caution and paranoia, but on Christmas the new Covid strain (XBB) got me. My Covid-avoiding behavior and my reaction to finally getting it reveals some of my cognitive biases.

The Endowment Bias : The Endowment Bias is prizing something more than it’s worth merely because you own it. Let’s say you want to go to a concert, but have a tough time deciding whether to buy a ticket for $100. Unable to decide, you resort to flipping a coin and it comes up heads, which means “buy.” A week later, someone offers you $150 for your ticket. The Endowment Effect makes you refuse the offer because your ownership of the ticket has increased its value to you.

I “owned” being one of the very few people I knew to remain Covid-free, and the longer I went without being infected, the more I valued my Covid “virginity.” Since I was not at high risk, I valued my status far more than it was worth, which in turn fed my cautious behavior.

The Effort Justification Bias: Closely related to the Endowment Bias is the Effort Justification Bias. The more effort you expend in acquiring something, the more you value it. Let’s say your daughter wants a dollhouse. In one scenario, you buy one that’s fully assembled; in the other scenario, you spend hours assembling the dollhouse from a 139 piece kit. At the end of the day, it’s the same dollhouse, but you will value it far more if you assembled it.

The more effort I put in to avoiding Covid, the more I valued the avoidance, and the more my avoidance behavior was reinforced. Having invested all that effort in not being infected, I didn’t want to “blow it” with a behavior that I perceived as risky.

There was also an aspect of what I call the “negative slot machine” syndrome. The worst fear of someone feeding thousands of dollars into a slot machine all day long without a jackpot is to leave the machine for a few minutes and have another player steal in to “steal” the jackpot that was rightfully yours.

This is also known as The Gambler’s Fallacy, the idea that if a flipped coin comes up heads 17 times in a row, the odds of it coming up tails the next time can seem far more likely than the true odds of 50%, because how long can the streak possibly last?  This fallacy added fuel to my avoidance as I believed that as every day passed without getting infected, the odds of my getting infected increased, even if my protective routines stayed exactly the same.

You’d think that recounting all these biases would make me behave less cautiously (more sanely?) going forward. My immunities have increased, and I’ve lost the endowment and effort justification biases that led me to overvalue caution. But there is another bias that cuts against that line of thought.

The Recency Bias: Now, just twelve days after my symptoms started and a week after they were really painful, when I think of Covid, I think of my recent pain and the recent inconvenience of getting it. That Recency makes it loom much larger in my mind than if I’d had the same symptoms and disease a year ago. Accordingly, I fear a repeat more. It’s the power of “last impressions.”

I can also overvalue my refusal to give in to a particular bias, in this case the Outcome Bias. That’s when you follow the right process, but get an unfavorable result or vice versa. You get vaccinated against the flu, and you still get the flu. So you conclude that getting the flu vaccine was the wrong thing to do because you got the wrong outcome. You’ll never get it again.

Or, back to gambling, you’re at the blackjack table and you have a sixteen against the dealer’s seven. You have a “feeling” that you should stand and not take another card, even though the laws of probability and math scream that you should. You ignore the screams and stand. The dealer drays a nine and then a ten and busts, You decide that from now on, you’re going to listen to your instinct, the math be damned.  

I pride myself on avoiding the Outcome Bias. So, maybe that avoidance is itself a Bias. I have told myself that my Covid protocols were the right process, even if eventually I got an undesired outcome. Maybe in this case I’m overvaluing the process vs. the outcome, because I want to justify my past behavior.

Then there is the “G.I. Joe” Bias, which is overconfidence in one’s ability to avoid Cognitive Biases simply by being aware of them. The name of this Bias comes from the 1980s TV cartoon G.I. Joe, which always ended with a brief “lesson” for kids, such as “the cover-up is worse than the crime” or “stranger danger.”

The lesson was always followed by the tag line of “Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.” But researchers have shown that simply knowing about cognitive biases doesn’t really help you avoid them.

It occurs to me, however, that many of these biases are invaluable in the realm of building healthy relationships. The Endowment Effect gives my friends, my siblings, my children, my parents, my significant other tremendous value because they are mine. And if a relationship is healthy and strong, it didn’t come that way ready-made out of a box; it derived its enduring power from years and years of mutual effort. And so perhaps the Effort Justification Bias is merely a dry and academic term for nothing more or less than love.