Beware of The Immediacy Effect

This one cognitive bias could be the biggest barrier between you and your goals.

The human condition is plagued and augmented — depending on the context — with all sorts of ingrained biases, many of which we are unaware of.

The sunk cost fallacy has us investing in all kinds of pursuits, despite the lack of ongoing reward or utility, just because we’ve already invested a lot of time, money or energy into said pursuit and don’t want it to be a waste of time. Paradoxically, we end up wasting even more time and money.

Anchoring forces us to rely too heavily, or ‘anchor’ on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject). This could manifest as returning to buy the first pair of jeans you saw whilst shopping, despite having checked out several other stores afterwards.

More critically, it could be going with the first idea you came up with for a product, as opposed to numerous better ideas you came up with thereafter. We often write off better alternatives, because we give more weighting to those that came first.

Or how about the cheerleader effect? People (or things) tend to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation. Have you ever purchased a vehicle from a…