How Many Cognitive Biases Does My (and Your) Game Have?

[shipitfish]

I have an interested lay-person's understanding of an area of social psychology known as attribution theory. I took a near-minor in Psychology in college (I left off a few courses due to laziness and over-obsession with taking all the Computer Science electives offered), so I don't have that advanced nor complicated understanding of this sub-field. However, social psychology and addiction were the two areas of psychology that interested me most. Now that I play so much poker, I'm glad I took those courses. Some of the basic principles, particularly those related to cognitive bias and attribution theory, can be applied pretty directly to poker without too deep of an understanding. (Indeed, rereading Shoonmaker's Psychology of Poker is helping me see how these social psychology principles apply to poker. He avoids technical terms to make his work accessible to those who haven't taken an introductory course in social psychology. However, if you get a working understanding of the technical terms before reading his book, you can see where he's applying the principles.)

It's actually kind of amazing how quickly and easily you can start to apply these principles to poker. The wikipedia entry that lists some common cognitive biases reads almost like a laundry list of problems we all have and witness when we play poker! I stumbled across the page doing some poker research this past weekend, and I got inspired to make a journal plan. I'm going to go through each of these cognitive biases and consider carefully how I might have each of these biases in my attitudes toward poker. I'll also consider how I can look for these cognitive biases in others to improve my edge against them. I may even be able to pull out some examples from previous posts, and consider them in light of particular cognitive biases.

Of course, by linking to the page, I've already spoiled some of the thunder. Those of you that click through will read the list and the short descriptions and begin to see quickly how they apply to poker easily. Poker is just one of those contrived, confined social settings that let these psychological concepts play out without too much complexity.

To start, I'll focus on the list available on wikipedia, since the definitions seem reasonable and are easily linkable. I hope that you'll find this series useful and educational to consider. I'll probably go slowly, interspersing these over the coming weeks with my regular types of posts, so that this doesn't become the “cognitive theory poker journal”.

And, after all, I don't want to suddenly “anchor” all of my poker thinking to cognitive bias and attribution theory. That might lead to a choice-supportive bias that I've made a good decision to focus so much on this issue. :)