Egotistical Irrationality

I'm currently reading a book titled Everyday Irrationality : How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally on the recommendation of a friend. The author Robyn M. Dawes is a professor at Carnegie Mellon. As I would hope and expected, the book makes one question the basic assumptions of human behavior to identify the places where we are being irrational. Right up my alley. Somewhat academic (understandably so!) but still very interesting stuff nonetheless.

So as a result of reading this book and another one of my daily experiences, I started thinking this evening about how ego plays a role in irrational decisions. This is specifically in reference to a previous blog (okay, this sucks, the way my archives are setup using frames right now, I cannot link directly to a blog entry. That is unacceptable and so I'll have to change that soon, till then, you'll just have to find it in the archives yourself) titled Fear, Regret and Hope. In that blog I wrote about how IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) fear of the consequences often prevents us from taking an action and if we succumb to that fear, what we land up with is regret. Today's hypothesis based on my own experience is that the fear is primarily that of getting a bruised ego. The fear of rejection. The fear of failure. The fear of looking like a complete idiot -- what's that saying... It's better to keep you mouth shut and have people think you are a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt!.

So ego plays a huge role. Often to the extent that because of it... or better yet, because of the fear of getting a bruised ego, we choose to not take a chance, which if analyzed could be an irrational decision. Well, I'm not sure about that.. because does a bruised ego count as a possible negative outcome? How do you quantify the effect of that?

Anyhow, the bottomline is that I feel a little hypocritical, because though I can sit here and write about this stuff and analyze my own actions, it is definitely a lot harder to embody the ideas everytime, all the time, in all situations. I guess I'm still too self-conscious in some cases and still need to train myself better :) There is always room for improvement. It's the largest room in the house.

:note to self. sbux aim