This article was originally written as a guest post for Mental Reshape.
When author David Foster
Wallace made a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he talked about
the dangers of operating on what he termed: “our natural default setting”.
Wallace argued that through conscious choice, people have the power to interpret and respond to the frustrating, mundane realities of everyday life in a manner that is healthy and satisfying. The title of the speech: This is Water, refers to an allegory about fish not being conscious that the water around them is, actually, water.
By ‘natural default
setting’, Wallace is referring to the unconscious: evolution’s way of filtering the huge amount of sensory information we are
exposed to each and every day. But the unconscious has its drawbacks. Decades
of psychological research have uncovered from it a number of cognitive biases
that affect the way we think and behave.
We’re going to look at
five of these biases. All five occur when we operate on our natural default
setting, and all can be protected against when we consciously choose how to
respond to our environment. Through in-depth examination we can learn to break
free from harmful behavioural patterns, taking control of our life and, ultimately,
our happiness.
