How to turn Your Weakness of Bias into a Strength of Genius

B.F. Skinner's shadow still lurks around Harvard.

Here's a man who was really into reinforcement as a powerful thought.

 If the consequences are bad, there is a high chance the action will not be repeated; if the consequences are good, the actions that led to it being repeated become more probable. Skinner called this the principle of reinforcement.

His experiments were no doubt ingenious, but unfortunately, his reputation was lost in a few places.

Billionaire Charlie Munger (who is also Warren Buffet's business partner) devised his own set of psychological biases that he used to create his own system of psychology.

For Munger, Skinner's loss of reputation can be attributed to what he calls "Man-with-a-Hammer" Syndrome, originally known as the Law of the Instrument by psychologist Abraham Maslow.

To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail.

Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of academia, and this syndrome doesn't exempt bright people.

So why is man-with-a-hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, it’s incentive-caused bias.

A man's professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people — here you have a bias towards consistency and commitment tendency.

Often you have three, four, or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking — partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world — you have learned a lesson that’s very useful in life.

George Bernard Shaw had a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma,

“In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”

But as Munger points out, he didn’t have it quite right because it isn’t so much a conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

That's the world we all live in and how we tell ourselves stories about that world.

Someone tells you what is good for him. He doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than someone who is deeply convinced of a story about how to live on this earth.

In my own observations, trials, and tribulations I've come to my own conclusion that a form of genius is this -

When you have a hammer, you go looking only for nails.

Omar M. Khateeb is medical device marketer with a focus on surgical robotics.

His interests reside in sales psychology, neuromarketing, and self-development practices.

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