Chapter 2: Why I've Eaten From The Same Pizza Place For 6 Years Straight

Remember how I confessed in Chapter 1 that my wife thinks I'm selectively deaf when I'm watching TV? Well, buckle up, because that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my brain's quirky wiring! Today, we're diving into cognitive biases – those mental shortcuts our brains take that sometimes lead us hilariously (or frustratingly) astray. And trust me, I'm embarrassingly familiar with them.

I've been fascinated by these biases ever since I realized I've ordered from the exact same pizza place for more than six years straight. One of my friends ordered from there once, I liked it, and somehow my brain decided 'mission accomplished – pizza problem solved forever!' Never mind that I was living in a city with probably hundreds of amazing pizza options I've never tried. My brain said 'this one's good enough' and called it a day.

As the great writer Anaïs Nin once said, "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." That, in a nutshell, is the starting point for understanding bias – our internal landscape heavily influences what and how we perceive the external world.

Bias 101: Your Brain's 'Quick Save' Function

Let's break this down super simply: a cognitive bias is just a mental shortcut. That's it! It's like when my brain decided 'this pizza place = good' and then completely shut down the 'maybe explore other options' department. These shortcuts are just your brain's way of saying, 'I don't have time to analyze EVERY pizza joint, so I'll stick with what worked once.'

Think of bias as your brain's 'quick save' function. And boy, does my brain love hitting that button! It's not just with pizza – I did the exact same thing with clothes shopping. Back home, I had my go-to brand. When I moved to Toronto a year and a half ago and couldn't find it, I panicked until I found a replacement brand I liked. Case closed, shopping problem solved! Have I considered that there might be better options out there? Nope. My brain says, 'Why waste precious mental energy when we've got something that works?' Classic brain shortcut at work!

Picture this: You're scrolling through potential movies to watch. You see one with an actor you usually dislike. Does your brain maybe, just maybe, lean towards skipping it before you even read the synopsis or reviews? That little flicker of "nope" based on a past association? That's a bias whispering in your ear. Your brain used the shortcut: "Dislike Actor X = Probably Dislike Movie Y." Fast? Yes. Potentially wrong? Also yes.

As Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the legends who really put cognitive biases on the map, showed us, these shortcuts are part of our everyday thinking. They arise from how our brains process information rapidly, often relying on intuition and simple rules rather than complex logic.

Survival Mode: Why Evolution Programmed Us for Shortcuts

This is the big question, isn't it? Why would nature build such a powerful brain and then pack it with these potential flaws? Were the evolutionary engineers having an off day?

Nope. The reason we are capable of bias, the reason our brains are designed to take shortcuts, is beautifully simple and brutally practical: survival and efficiency in a dangerous past.

Our brains are incredible, but they require massive amounts of energy. And back on the savannah, every calorie counted. More importantly, every second counted. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of leisurely contemplating every rustle in the grass or every stranger they encountered. They needed to make instant decisions.

In that high-stakes world, the ability to take a mental shortcut – to favor the "better safe than sorry" approach, to quickly identify friend or foe – wasn't a flaw. It was often the difference between living to see another sunrise and becoming part of the food chain. As the popular saying often attributed to Darwin goes,, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." Our capacity for quick, biased judgment was, ironically, a key adaptation.

Natural selection favored the brains that were efficient. The ones that could make quick, albeit sometimes imperfect, judgments that generally increased the odds of staying alive and reproducing.

Caveman Software, Modern Hardware: Our Brain's Outdated Operating System

So, let's take a quick peek into our evolutionary past to see the roots of this shortcut wiring. These aren't the specific biases you might hold about, say, pineapple on pizza, but rather the fundamental tendencies that got hardwired into our grey matter.

• The Need for Speed (The Ancestor of Quick Judgments): If you saw a shadow that might be a predator, pausing to conduct a detailed analysis of its size, shape, speed, and probability of being a threat was a bad strategy. Jumping behind a rock immediately was a good strategy. Our brains developed the capacity for rapid, intuitive judgments based on minimal information. This is the engine behind many quick-thinking heuristics we still use today.

• Fear First (Or Why Office Gossip Is Usually Negative): Early in my career, I experienced this first-hand with a colleague everyone warned me about. 'He's smug, egoistic, hard to work with,' they said. I immediately felt my guard go up before even meeting him. When we were assigned to the same project, I braced myself for a nightmare collaboration.
  Plot twist: he turned out to be one of the most straightforward, honest colleagues I've ever had! Sure, he didn't sugar-coat feedback, but his directness was actually refreshing. We became fast friends and still keep in touch to this day. But here's the thing – if we hadn't been forced to work together, I probably would have avoided him completely based on those negative warnings.
  This is our brain's negativity bias in action. For our ancestors, being hyper-sensitive to potential threats was a survival advantage. Missing a meal was unfortunate; becoming a meal was game over. Brains that gave extra weight to negative information – that suspicious rustling in the bushes, that strange smell in the food – were more likely to survive and pass on those genes. As researchers have found, negative information simply carries more weight in our mental processing than positive.
  In modern life, this means office gossip about who to 'watch out for' sticks with us far longer than hearing about someone's good qualities. Social media platforms have basically weaponized this ancient wiring – outrage and arguments spread faster than cute kitten videos for a reason. Our brains just can't help rubbernecking at the negative.

• Us vs. Them (The 'Developer Tribe' Effect): A few years ago, when I was working at an office-based company, I noticed something fascinating – developers somehow found each other at company events like they had built-in developer-detecting radar! At one memorable office dinner, a new programmer and our senior dev who'd been with the company for years became instant best friends within an hour, while people from different departments who had worked on multiple projects together for years barely chatted beyond work stuff.
  And it wasn't just a one-time thing. I started noticing how people from the same department naturally gravitated toward each other, even when they'd just met. Now that I work remotely, I still see these tribal dynamics playing out in virtual spaces – the Slack channels for different departments develop their own inside jokes and communication styles that feel almost like different dialects.
  This tribal thinking makes perfect evolutionary sense. Our cave-dwelling ancestors lived in small groups where cooperation within the tribe was essential for survival. Being suspicious of outsiders was just smart – 'different' often meant 'danger.' So our brains got really good at quickly sorting people into 'like me' (good, safe, trustworthy) and 'not like me' (approach with caution). Fast forward to modern work life, and we're still running that ancient tribal software!

• Certainty Over Accuracy (Or Why We Ignore Actual Data When Users Say Nice Things): As a product manager, I've fallen into this trap more times than I'd like to admit. After a product release, we get those first glowing testimonials from early users: 'This feature is exactly what I needed! Game-changer!' And suddenly, we're high-fiving across the office, convinced we've nailed product-market fit.
  Meanwhile, the actual usage data is quietly screaming, 'Uh, guys? They're barely using the feature...' But we're too busy basking in the praise to notice. Then three months later, when adoption numbers tank, we're scratching our heads wondering what went wrong.
  This is confirmation bias in all its glory – our brain's stubborn tendency to embrace information that confirms what we want to believe while conveniently ignoring contradictory evidence. And it turns out, this isn't just me being a bad product manager – it's actually ancient survival wiring! For our ancestors, having a stable, consistent understanding of the world ('Berry Patch X is always safe after rain') was often more valuable than perfect accuracy. Being mostly right and confident beat being slightly more accurate but hesitant when quick decisions meant survival.
  But in product development, this same wiring that helped our ancestors survive can lead us to launch features nobody actually needs. Progress, right?

So Where Do Our Specific Biases Come From?

Look, I'd love to tell you I've overcome all my biases since learning about them. That I now carefully evaluate every pizza place before ordering. That I try new clothing brands regularly.

But that would be a big fat lie.

The truth is, I still catch myself taking these mental shortcuts constantly. Just last week, I caught myself ignoring product usage data because a customer said something nice about a feature I worked hard on. My ancient brain wiring is still very much in charge a lot of the time.

What I find most fascinating, though, is that while we ALL have these shortcut-taking brains, the specific biases we develop differ dramatically from person to person. My pizza loyalty might seem bizarre to my adventurous foodie friend who tries a new restaurant every week. And my colleague who instantly bonded with our new developer might have very different 'tribal' instincts than I do.

This brings us to the really interesting question: if these mental shortcuts are hardwired into all human brains, why do YOUR biases look so different from MINE?

In our next chapter, we're going to explore this fascinating question – the origins of our specific biases. We'll look at how the world around us – our societies, cultures, and unique personal journeys – acts as the sculptor, shaping those ancient shortcut tendencies into the distinct biases that influence our modern thoughts and actions.

Until then, try catching yourself the next time you take a mental shortcut. And if you catch yourself in the act of bias – welcome to the club! I'll be over here, ordering from the same pizza place and wondering why I never learn.