How to Get Better at Being Wrong

In a world flooded with information, how can we separate fact from fiction - and what happens when we realize we believed something false to be true?

In this week’s episode of Everyday Better, Finance Professor Alex Edmans dives into how mental shortcuts like confirmation bias shape our decisions and perpetuate misinformation. Using insights from his book May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases - And What We Can Do About It, Alex explains how even the experts can get tripped up by their own assumptions, and how cultivating cognitive diversity and critical thinking functions as an antidote.

"We don’t fall for misinformation because we’re bad people - we’re just people," says Alex. “We have a viewpoint, and if we see something that latches onto that viewpoint, we're more likely to believe it.”

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00:00 - Introduction
03:41 - The misinformation trap
07:24 - Confirmation bias
12:20 - Black-and-white thinking
18:28 - The role of social media
23:25 - Groupthink in the workplace
28:35 - Practical steps to combat cognitive biases
32:12 - Healthy skepticism
34:55 - Conclusion

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