Category Archives: Videos

The availability heuristic is why one vivid story beats a year of clean data — your brain mistakes how easily something comes to mind for how often it’s actually true.

This is 1 of 52 biases in my book “Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself” — free on Kindle Unlimited: https://the3minutementor.com/books/ | Weekly essays: nigeldessau.substack.com

One bad hire from a particular university, one project that failed the last time you tried it, one customer who shouted loudest in the QBR — each of these gets weighted far above the data sitting in the deck, because it’s easier to recall. The availability heuristic doesn’t feel like bias from the inside. It feels like experience.

In this episode: why vividness beats frequency in your head, how meetings systematically reward the person with the best story rather than the best evidence, and the one question to ask before you let a memorable example override a number.

#AvailabilityHeuristic #CognitiveBias #DecisionMaking

Confirmation bias is why smart people can believe almost anything — and why being clever makes it worse, not better. Intelligence doesn’t stop you from gathering evidence for the conclusion you already reached; it just makes you better at defending it.

Watch what happens when the evidence finally goes against you. You don’t drop the belief — you patch it. That’s ad hoc reasoning: a fresh explanation invented for each inconvenient fact, so the original claim survives untouched. Its cousin is special pleading — holding everyone else’s argument to a standard you quietly exempt your own from. Their project slipped because they’re disorganized; yours slipped because of circumstances. Each patch sounds reasonable on its own. Stacked up, they sound like a belief being protected rather than tested.

In this episode: what confirmation bias is actually protecting, how to hear ad hoc reasoning and special pleading in a meeting, and the one question that breaks the loop before a bad decision gets made.

More at the3minutementor.com | Substack: nigeldessau.substack.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nigeldessau

#ConfirmationBias #LogicalFallacies #DecisionMaking

Playing the victim doesn’t just distort how you see the world. It changes who’s willing to follow you.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Why “speaking truth to power” can sometimes become an excuse to stop questioning ourselves.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Admitting a mistake challenges our beliefs. Admitting someone else was right challenges our ego.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

The cognitive biases that quietly transform whispers into certainty

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Correlation is not causation — but your brain refuses to believe it. A famous graph shows that the number of Nicolas Cage films each year tracks almost perfectly with the number of people who drown in swimming pools. Cage didn’t drown anyone — yet your mind still sees a story in the pattern. That’s a spurious correlation, and it fools smart people every day.

In this episode, I use one ridiculous graph to show why we can’t resist turning coincidence into cause — the trap of confusing correlation vs causation — and what it means for the decisions you make at work.

Based on the book Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself. More on the stories we tell ourselves at work: https://nigeldessau.substack.com and https://the3minutementor.com

#CorrelationVsCausation #CognitiveBias #DecisionMaking

Present bias quietly shapes everything from your savings account to your career, and once you recognize it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Just Because It Happened After Doesn’t Mean It Happened Because Of It

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Why avoiding a decision often feels safe but quietly sabotages progress

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.