Do you think you make your own decisions? Is it easy to manipulate you? Before you answer, let me show you something. I will describe the characteristics of two people. I will say five words for each of them. As you read the words in order, try to decide who is the evil person and who is the good person. Please write down the first answer that comes to mind. Okay, ready?

First Person: Love, Care, Average, Evil, Dark.
Second Person: Dark, Evil, Average, Care, Love.

I'm sure most of you think that the first person is good and the second person is evil, but the words I spoke about both people are the same. I simply changed the order of the words and you made a completely wrong decision.

To explain why we can be so easily manipulated and make wrong decisions, I will review a book called "Thinking, Fast and Slow" written by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is an economist and psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work in the field of economics. The information in the book is simply amazing. The price of an unread book is very high, regardless of your profession in life. It can save you from making bad decisions and losing a lot of money.

The author begins the book with an introduction to the concepts of System 1 and System 2. To explain it simply, let's imagine that there are two people sitting in your brain. The first person is called System 1, and the second person is called System 2. System 1 works automatically, intuitively, involuntarily and effortlessly. Imagine that System 1 is your schoolmate who always talks a lot in class, doesn't think before he speaks, knows very little, but rushes to answer every question. On the other hand, System 2 is very slow. It requires focusing, calculating, analyzing and taking conscious actions. System 2 is like the other school friend who sits in the corner quietly, not very sociable, usually doesn't talk much, but very smart.

From an evolutionary standpoint, both systems are important. For example, if we didn't have System 1, we wouldn't be able to automatically run away when we see a bear. If we didn't have System 2, we wouldn't be able to focus and solve complex problems. Every system has its place, but problems arise when we apply the wrong system. Most of the time, System 1 always gets ahead of System 2 and leads us to make wrong decisions. This is mainly because System 2 is very slow and does not want to wake up and work.

After an introduction to System 1 and System 2, the author discusses the various biases that cause the contradiction between these two systems. One of the biases Kahneman talks about is called "priming." Priming simply means that exposure to one thing influences your behavior and decisions about the next thing. For example, the little experiment we did at the beginning of the video is a perfect example. The first word influenced the way you think and make a decision. When you heard the first word about the first person, you were 90% sure that person was good. After the second and third words, you were already 100% sure. In the final decision, the fourth and fifth words had almost no effect on your final decision. The same thing happened with another person.

There is a famous wine experiment where some days they played French music in a restaurant, so people started buying more French wine. Other days they played German music and people bought more German wine. A simple change in music has completely changed people's shopping behavior.

Now, let's see how we can use priming to our advantage in everyday life. For example, when you wake up and look around your room, do you see things that make you happy and content? If not, it will affect your whole day. After you wake up, if you spend two minutes expressing gratitude for the things you already have, such as your family, health, and friends, it can change your attitude about how you deal with problems. When you go to an interview or meet someone important, pay attention to how you greet, how you shake hands and how you look. As you saw in the previous example, the first thing or two is enough to make a final decision. If you have a website and sell something, study what are the first two things your customers see and how it makes them feel.

To show you the power of priming, I'll give you an example from my experience. When I was buying an apartment, I didn't use real estate agents or any other outside services to evaluate apartments. Because of this, I knew that the sellers could easily hide some problems from me. That's why I decided to apply the priming principle to make sellers behave honestly and morally. At the beginning of every conversation with the seller, I always started with the sentence, "Thank you very much for your time. I hope we can reach a fair agreement. At any time, if you feel that I am being unfair or saying something that is not correct, please stop me and re we'll discuss it. I just want a fair and ethical deal for both of us." This sentence may sound simple, but it has had a huge impact on salespeople's behavior. Every time I started a conversation with this sentence, the salespeople were very careful about what they said to me throughout the meeting. I could see they were trying very hard not to lie. In some cases, they even told me about problems that could arise after five years. Two sellers even openly recommended that I not buy their apartments because they felt that, based on my situation, it would not be a good option for me. This simple sentence not only saved thousands of dollars, but turned every meeting into a pleasant experience.

Priming can also be negative. For example, when you constantly criticize yourself and say that you are not good enough, that you cannot do it, you are setting yourself up for failure. You may not notice it, but these words quickly become behavior. Priming works on an unconscious level, and you completely do not notice its effects. For example, research shows that asking people to simply read words associated with rude behavior later affected their rude behavior and interrupting other people's conversations. Now, just think for a moment. If simply reading rude words affects your behavior badly, can you imagine what negative thoughts do to you? Thoughts are much more powerful than reading words because they involve imagination and emotions.

Now, let's talk about loss bias. Imagine that I come to you and offer to play a game where I flip a coin. If you win, I will give you ten thousand dollars, but if you lose, you will give me ten thousand dollars. You have a fifty percent chance of winning and a fifty percent chance of losing. Would you play such a game? I'm sure your answer would be no. Although the amount of money you will win and lose is equal, I have to offer a much higher reward for you to play such a game. The amount of space for negative emotions in our brain is three times greater than the space for positive emotions. The negative feelings that come from losing are much stronger than the positive feelings that come from winning. In short, we simply hate losing, and this creates a loss bias.

Let's see how we can use this knowledge to our advantage in our daily life. For example, if you are persuading someone to do something, don't just talk about the gain they will have; also tell them about the losses they will face. Implicit bias can be very dangerous and limit us from acting, especially when it comes to starting a new idea or business. When we think about the risks we will face, we become paralyzed. One way to reduce the effects of loss bias is to focus on long-term benefits instead of short-term problems.

A sunk cost is any past cost that has already been paid and cannot be recovered. For example, let's say you buy a ticket for a concert, and on the day of the event you get a cold. Even though you are sick, you decide to go to the concert because otherwise you would be wasting money. The same happens with our work or project. Regardless of the losses, we continue to put money and effort into the business simply because we have spent money on it so far. Logically speaking, what you have spent so far has no bearing on the future success or failure of your business or relationship. You may now think that you are being logical and that your past spending does not affect your future decisions. If that's the case, why are you still keeping all those clothes you don't wear? They take up a ton of space in your closet, but you don't want to throw them away because you paid good money for them. Why not throw away the old furniture that is taking up a lot of space in your room? Is it worth anything or is it just because you paid money for it in the past? Why not throw away the candy you bought in the past, even though you're on a diet now? To make all these decisions, we need System 2 to work, but unfortunately, it's too lazy.

Framing Bias: Let's say you feel bad and go to the doctor. After the examination, the doctor tells you that there is a 10% chance that you will die. And then you go to another doctor, and he tells you that there is a 90% chance of survival. From a statistical point of view, both doctors told you absolutely the same thing. However, you would feel much worse when you hear that you have a 10% chance of dying. This is called framing. Kahneman says that the choices we make are strongly influenced by the way they are presented to us. Different expressions, settings and situations will have a strong influence on the way we make decisions. It works like a physical frame on a picture. If you put the image in a red frame, it will highlight the red in the image. Placing the same image in a blue frame highlights the blue.

Halo effect: Attractive people are perceived as smarter, wittier and more likable than less attractive people. If two women committed the same crime, we tend to punish the more attractive one less. It makes absolutely no sense, but our System 1 is influenced by physical appearance and other irrelevant characteristics that have nothing to do with the decision we make. For example, if an employer finds an applicant attractive or likable, they are more likely to also rate the applicant as intelligent, competent, and qualified. So, the next time you are choosing a business partner or taking advice from someone, ask yourself if that person really has valuable skills and knowledge or if you are swayed by their looks and other irrelevant things like a nicer car, rich lifestyle, etc.

Anchoring: Let's say you want to buy a leather jacket and you find a very nice one in the store. You check the price and see it's $400 and you think that's expensive, so you decide to return it. But when you return it, you notice that you checked the price incorrectly and the real price is actually $250. Suddenly your jacket will look cheaper because of the initial number you saw, even if it was the wrong number. This is called anchoring. People often rely on the first information they hear or see and then make further judgments. That's one of the reasons why car dealerships put their most expensive models at the front of the showroom, so that when you drive past them and see other normally priced cars, they suddenly look cheaper. Again, logically, past numbers or things we see shouldn't influence our decisions, but they do a lot. One way to protect yourself from anchoring is to have a limit in your mind before you start working. For example, if you are going shopping, set a mental amount of what you would be willing to pay, then check the price. If it's more than your limit, you're out of luck.

Possession Effect: The possession effect is an emotional bias that states that when we own something or have a sense of ownership, we irrationally overvalue it regardless of its objective value. That's the principle behind test driving cars and allowing consumers to play with products. The more time people spend using the product, the greater the sense of ownership becomes. The same applies to free trials of software and online services. The more time people spend using and customizing them, the greater the sense of ownership becomes and the harder it is to give up. The ownership effect is one of the reasons we love Ikea furniture. When we buy furniture from Ikea, we spend time building it and suddenly it becomes something we created, and we love it even more because of it. The effect of possession has a lot to do with our decisions, so always ask yourself if the things you support are worth supporting or is it because they are yours. Is your old Ikea furniture you're looking to sell worth the price you're asking for, or are you being swayed by the holdover effect? Is the idea you're defending in your team really a good idea, or are you supporting it because it came from you?

Confirmation bias: Three years ago, I was trading on one of the trading platforms, and after a few days, I read somewhere that the company I was trading with was a scam. So I hopped on my computer and typed in the search "Is this company a scam?" And guess what I found? A bunch of people who claimed it was a scam. So I withdrew all my money in a panic, even losing a lot of money because I exited my positions too early. After a few days, I researched other trading platforms and realized that there were a lot of similar bad reviews for most of these companies, which started to look suspicious because they couldn't all be bad. I later found out that the company was not a scam; i just asked a biased question on google and read only bad comments that supported my suspicions and beliefs. In psychology, this behavior is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for and find evidence that supports our opinions and beliefs and ignore the rest. We humans interpret all new information in such a way that our previous beliefs and conclusions remain intact. Simply put, we forget that the coin has two sides and focus only on the one side that supports our beliefs. If you want to believe something, you will find evidence to support it. You can even find videos that claim the earth is flat if you believe in the flat earth theory.

Confirmation bias affects us all and is present everywhere. For example, people generally spend more time searching for information that supports their political position, while ignoring the rest of the information that contradicts their position. Confirmation biases can cause physicians to seek new information in ways that confirm their initial diagnoses, while ignoring signs that may prove the diagnoses to be wrong. It is very difficult to fight against confirmation bias; however, we can reduce its dangers by following three steps: First, accept that it exists. To solve a problem, you must first accept that you have a problem. Second, always seek opposing advice. It's usually painful to listen to someone who has the opposite view, but it can help you spot the warning signs. Maybe your best business idea is really bad, but you want it to succeed so much that you only see positive signs and ignore the lack of demand and proceed without adequate validation and testing of the idea. Three, don't ask probing questions. As I did in the example above, try asking more neutral questions instead.

That would be all.
Have a nice day.