In a Ted Talk by Dan Gilbert, he discussed how people make bad decisions based on a number of errors that lead us to asort of false reasoning that make usdo something which later we may regret. A lot of people make errors in estimating the odds of an event actually happening, an obvious example being winning the lottery. A lot of this error is caused by the media or only remembering events with a particular outcome. For example you only hear about people who won the lottery, not all the people who lost. Now when you think about the lottery your memory recalls all the amazing stories from people who have won so there is a skewed perception in your mind that you could win the lottery. For a school students, cheating on a test is an ethical issue which comes up a lot and while there were instances when I was younger when I cheated it doesn’t really happen anymore- but everyone occasionally glances or asks each other for help during small quizzes in languages when the teacher is not listening, or looks at the idea of the person next to them. So why do we this for ‘low stakes’ test, but not for big tests or exams? It may be because our experience in getting caught cheating on a more serious test has been much harsher, or we hear big scandals of students who have lost diplomas because they cheated in their IB exams which confirms our biases that the consequences are only extreme in serious tests. The act of cheating is the same in both cases but due to our experiences and memory of consequences of cheating on big tests we are more afraid to do so. As students we apply reasoning which contains a slightly false premise- that since the task doesn’t necessarily count for our final IB scores, it doesn’t matter as much if we cheat.

Gilbert also talks about the error of comparing things to what they used to be in the past and missing out on an opportunity. I do this a lot when deciding what food to purchase, or buying an item from a seller such as on carousell. I will waste a lot of time trying to find the ‘best’ deal according to values which I think are acceptable based on my past transactions, and sometimes I travel to a further location to get a slightly cheaper deal. Eventually my travel cost is the same as the money which I was ‘saving’.