How To Get Your Own Way

by Craig Shrives

About This Site

"How To Get Your Own Way" covers five themes:

• Cognitive Biases, Fallacies, and Effects. Improve your understanding of how our minds take shortcuts to reach conclusions. Then, form strategies to get your own way or to defend yourself against those trying to get one over on you.
• Statistics. Develop a critical eye so you can spot when statistics are being manipulated by peddlers, politicians, or the press.
• Body Language. People's body movements can contradict or confirm what they are saying. Becoming more aware of what is going on around you will help you read people better and give you an edge in dealing with them.
• Business Writing. No one cares what you’ve got to say unless it affects or entertains them. Learn how to write for maximum effect.

Factors Affecting Heuristics

Heuristics are the brain's frameworks for making decisions. Our heuristics are personalized by our experiences. More specifically, the way we make decisions is affected by:

• Personal biases (assigning importance to the ideas in arguments).
• Cognitive fallacies (making process errors when considering arguments)
• Cognitive effects (following tendencies when processing arguments)

These thinking "gremlins" can undermine your decision-making. Understanding them can not only help you to counter them but also help you to argue more effectively against others affected by them.

Below is a list of common biases, fallacies, and cognitive effects. (All the examples on this site come from How To Get Your Own Way, a book that covers effective writing, Critical Thinking, body language, statistics, and marketing.)

List of Cognitive Biases

• Anchoring
• Attentional Bias
• Availability Bias (with COVID example)
• Better Than Average Bias
• Choice Supportive Bias
• Confirmation Bias (with COVID example)
• Contrast Bias
• Distinction Bias
• Good Looking People Bias
• Groupthink
• Hindsight Bias
• Impact Bias
• Mirror Imaging
• Moral Credential Bias
• Negativity Bias
• News Media Bias
• Omissions Bias
• Reactance Bias
• Self Serving Bias
• Status Quo Bias

List of Cognitive Effects

• Barnum Effect
• Broken Biscuit Effect
• Compromise Effect
• Dunning Kruger Effect
• Endowment Effect
• Halo Effect
• Hyperbolic Discounting Effect
• Isolation Effect
• Ostrich Effect
• Rhyme As Reason Effect

List of Cognitive Fallacies

• Ad Hominem Argument
• Appeal to Authority Fallacy
• Appeal to Flattery Fallacy
• Base Rate Fallacy (with COVID example)
• Gamblers' Fallacy
• Obfuscation Fallacy

See Also