Why do smart people do dumb things? From my experience, these are the most common culprits:
- Sunk cost fallacy — “I’ve invested so much in this I can’t change course now.”
- Confirmation bias — You believe what you want to believe.
- Disconnected from ground truth — You have wrong assumptions about reality.
- Man with a hammer syndrome — “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
- Self-serving bias — “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- Overcomplicating — “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”