Just World Bias and Inequality
Discussions of inequality are pervaded by the Just World Bias — the tendency for people to believe that the world is or ought to be ‘just’ and people should get what they deserve. But often equality for some entails inequality for others, like hanging lead weights on ballerinas.
But the serious general problem for overcoming cognitive bias is the cases where the biases come in opposed pairs, with an example being the Just World Bias versus what I’ll call the Perverse World Bias (or Murphy’s bias): ‘If I take my umbrella it’s sure to be fine, but if I don’t, it’s sure to rain,’ or ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ etc.
Many proverbs have a similar problem, as in ‘Look before you leap’ versus ‘He who hesitates is lost.’ Proverb pairs with this property are useless as guides to action, though handy for hindsight.
Opposed pairs of biases have a similar shortcoming — because they cover all the ground, they end up covering none at all, and throw us back on ‘It depends’ which is where we started anyway.
How many opposed pairs of cognitive biases are there?
Fools Gold: Good point, but mighn't the preknowledge of these biases prevent one from going to the casino at all, thus overcoming the effects of these biases without actually activating them?
"...My favorite offsetting set of biases is the Gambler's fallacy, the notion that the law of averages has memory to induce negative correlations, countered by the "hot streak" fallacy, the notion that success breeds success, which induces positive correlation. ..."
And just as a proverb does not necessarily influence either thought processes or behavior, the cognitive biases of Gambler's Fallacy or "Hot Streak" exist in someone who is already at the gambling tables, already has a stack of chips, a free drink and a beautiful woman. To the extent that either fallacy pops into the gambler's mind, its likely to be selectively employed but most probably after the event!