Mind Traps in Love
How Daniel Kahneman's insights on cognitive bias illuminate our relationship misunderstandings.
Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) revolutionized our understanding of human thinking.1 His collaborative work with Amos Tversky earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics2 (unusual for a psychologist) and transformed fields from medicine to business.
Admittedly, Kahneman never marketed himself as a relationship guru. Yet his research on cognitive biases provides powerful insights explaining why couples have the same fights repeatedly, why we're so certain we understand others (despite evidence to the contrary), and why logical arguments rarely resolve emotional conflicts. In my couples therapy practice, I find myself thinking about his work constantly.
Here are twelve insights from Kahneman's masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that, viewed through a relationship lens, might just change how you connect with those you love:
Understanding Our Mind’s Natural Biases
The associative machine [that is, the mind] is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI [what you see is all there is] will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know.
As the WYSIATI [what you see is all there is] rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.
How Cognitive Biases Shape Our Stories
Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.
How Cognitive Biases Affect Our Relationships
Asked to reconstruct their former beliefs, people retrieve their current ones instead—an instance of substitution—and many cannot believe that they ever felt differently.
Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.
Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgement or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances.
The Illusion of Understanding
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in [their] mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident.
The Challenge of Overcoming Bias
How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us? The short answer is that little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.
We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize than perceptual illusions. The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition, and questioning your intuitions is unpleasant when you face the stress of a big decision.
These insights from Kahneman remind us that the most dangerous relationship assumption might be our certainty that we understand each other perfectly. Perhaps true connection begins not with confidence but with curiosity, acknowledging that our perceptions, memories, and interpretations are shaped by invisible biases we all share. In relationships, as in cognition, our greatest strength may be recognizing the limitations of our understanding.
Which quote gives you a new perspective on a relationship challenge you're facing?
Share this with someone you care about—especially if you're absolutely, positively, 100% certain they're the one being unreasonable in your latest disagreement. Surely they will appreciate it and, at long last, be convinced of the error in their ways.
Kahneman died last year, and there were many online acknowledgments of the world losing a giant in the field. But probably my favorite was Cass Sunstein’s. Sunstein was a close collaborator, but what I loved about his tribute was how we honored Kahneman’s enthusiasm for collaborating with his intellectual adversaries. This article is worth a read.
The story of the friendship between these two men is documented powerfully in Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project.
I loved this post, and the research folded perfectly into a draft I was working on around how to shift your mind to feel hopeful in the next moment of a tense interaction (instead of listening to your mind and believing it's predictions). It comes out Monday and I quoted you and linked back to here! I'm new to quoting/referencing other substack authors, so open to feedback or if that was ok. I enjoyed the synergies of our perspectives :)
I've read that book, and some of Kahneman's other work. (In fact, I referred to it in a post I just finished that will come out in a couple of weeks!) It was a while ago, and I hadn't thought to apply it to relationships so clearly. This post confirms that my tendency to approach conflict through questions is a good instinct--though I definitely also fall into the trap of making assumptions about how well I know someone or understand their motivations! Being human is a challenge.