Let’s talk psychology. Not the horse’s, you, your messed up head. There are several ways in which humans are lovely but irrational, one of which is cognitive biases. They affect you every day, on or off a horse, in equestrian or any other sport. I find them generally fascinating and right now I’m avoiding doing something else, so here’s a simplistic introduction to some common ones:
Sunk Cost Fallacy, Loss Aversion & the Endowment Effect
Sunk cost fallacy is the reason people who have already wasted money on tickets to a terrible film also waste their evening watching it. Sadly it can also be the reason people eat terrible food, get married, or take any next step – it’s the urge to justify previous decisions using the next one, despite the fact that throwing good time/money/energy after bad will not result in a gain.
This can mess up your horse-life. It means that you always want to progress in one direction. I’ve taken 20 years of dressage lessons so I’d better stick to dressage. My horse was bought for jumping, so I’d better do that. I’ve tried to solve this issue this way, so I’d better carry on. Why? There is no refund. We have an ethereal idea of “money or time wasted” despite the fact that often no future course will get that time or money back. You are where you are today. Go forward, in any direction you choose. Your horse is not wasted, your horse does not care.
Similar to sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion worries about the past, but in this case it’s avoiding facing an actualised loss. We hate loses, we are more averse to loss than we are attracted to gains. It’s the reason that people can lose millions on the stock market – when stocks start to sink people don’t want to sell quickly and take the small loss. Your stock is worth whatever it is worth today. It doesn’t matter whether you bought it today or last month, no one cares how much you actually paid for it – holding on to it hoping the price will go back up is fine, but it’s no stronger a position than buying it today. You’ve already lost the money. Sell the damn horse. This also matters in a less financial sense: I’ve already taken the day off/ put the big jumps out/ planned this hack. Whatever. Sometimes you’re genuinely happier if you can just put down the stubborn and take the hit. This also applies to getting problems diagnosed. I’m looking at me here.
Loss aversion is thought to be the reason we have the endowment effect – a phenomenon where people want more money to sell something than they’d pay themselves. It’s worth more because it’s mine. You don’t need me to talk about that, you’ve all got horses.
Confirmation Bias, Selection Bias & Ignoring Probability.
Can you have a favourite cognitive bias? I love confirmation bias, I see it every day. Ever noticed if someone annoys you everything they do is annoying, but if you have a crush on them then everything about them is lovely? We love patterns, and are evolved to try and make sense of the world quickly by seeking them out. We also love to be right. This gives us confirmation bias, where once we’ve formed a theory we look for evidence to support it, and ignore evidence to the contrary. This doesn’t half help people sell miracle cures. Given 30 horses that the gadget/supplement doesn’t work on, we’ll notice the three where it does; even though their improvement was probably nothing to do with the gadget/supplement/lucky socks/lack of turnout the day before. This doesn’t mean we’re stupid, it means we’re mathematical modellers, and want to find the trend.
Selection bias is a very similar phenomenon. If I tell you to look out for a red car or the number three you’ll notice it everywhere. You’ll be sitting in a red car and suddenly notice that it’s 3.33. Is it because I’m made of magic? No, it’s because there are several million individually observable things that happen to you every day, you just don’t normally take any notice of most of them. Why should you? Given several million things that you could observe, you’re not going to imbue significance into every single one – one in a million shots happen all the time, three or four times a day. Guess what I just walked passed? A car with the number plate NG12 2GF! What are the chances of that? One in 456976000 (four hundred and fifty seven million)! Are we excited? No, we really, really don’t care. Unless you’re actually looking for that number plate, but you know the odds were the same either way, and I still passed it. If you’re testing the theory that your horse goes well after you saw an N, or a G, or a 2, then you’re all excited, but that that doesn’t make it a randomised controlled trial. Of course you can see things if you look for them – do you think I actually know where I keep my keys? Doesn’t mean there wasn’t also a mug in the room, but I wasn’t looking for that mug.
Your subconscious is innumerate, or at least rubbish with probability because you’re dealing with a lot of data and sometimes it summarises badly. Clustering illusion means that any random set of data looks like it has clusters of data points in it. If it didn’t have clusters of points, it wouldn’t be random scatter, it’d be an evenly spaced pattern. Our addiction to order makes those clusters very seductive, but just because two things have happened at the same time doesn’t make them related, just that we looked for a pattern and we saw one. Sure you have a training method that generally gives you great results, that’s not necessarily an illusion, you’re probably mentally collecting a lot of data on that, noticing all the little things that give you a fairly accurate idea of what’s going on. But your friend’s horse had a similar problem and it got better when they put a dandelion on it’s head? That is what I mean by snake oil. That way madness lies.
I covered gambler’s fallacy a little in the last post. If you throw two heads in a row what are the chance of landing heads again? Still 50%, the same as your chance of throwing a tail, because your coin doesn’t care whether you just rolled heads. The idea that it does, and that there’s such a thing as a “run of luck” or that the roulette wheel can be at any point “due” to land on black is the reason that slot machines are the most profitable part of any casino. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have good form – confidence begets confidence and if your horse is going well there’s no reason that that should change. Similarly, you’re not due a win, but if you keep performing well probability says that you might have one. Point being the harder you train the luckier you get. Isn’t it the Whitakers who like to say that you win at home, and just go to the show to collect the rosettes?
Functional Fixedness
Functional fixedness is the phenomenon which makes you spend an hour looking for a hammer, whilst holding a perfectly heavy spanner. People don’t think of hitting a nail with a spanner, because they’ve categorized it and so forget it can do other things. Horse riders are remarkable at overcoming this. It’s not just a martingale, it’s a neck strap. It’s not just a lunge rein, it’s a loading device. Yet we still come out with “he’s a showjumper”, “she’s a cob”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that he’s a showjumper and she’s a cob, unless you’re implying that that prevents a second career or even a different first one.
Dunning–Kruger Effect
Deep breath. Dunning-Kruger effect was described by Darwin as ignorance begets confidence. Brutally, the less you know, the more likely you are to perceive yourself as an expert, and the more you know the more likely you are to not realise your own competence. This means that a lot of unskilled/uneducated people have illusory superiority, and love to force opinions, and a lot of excellent riders can’t explain how they do things because they assume what’s easy or obvious to them is the same for you.
There’s so much for more to say but this is already long and I’m drifting into dangerous pet-hate territory. Suffice that cognitive biases are not just crazy. Having a few short-cuts helps us make fast decisions on millions of things, just sometimes we get carried away with that when in fact we’d be better off realising what our influences are and why we want to do something or not. Go forth, be rational, and be a little more understanding of those that aren’t.
