Metis Ireland joins NFP Ireland

There’s a pattern here… if you’ve been following our series on behavioural biases and how to combat them, you’ll know that for the last 15 weeks, we’ve published the latest update regular as clockwork. If you’ve opted to subscribe to emails, then once a week, every week, there’s the next instalment sitting in your inbox.

First, let’s stop talking about ‘bias’ and start talking about ‘biases’. There are many, in fact, in our new White Paper, Making Better Decisions: Know Your Behavioural Biases, we identify 17 different types of mental process that can dangerously skew your financial decisions.

Metis Ireland hosted at table at Network Ireland’s Celebration of International Womens Day

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling upbeat about your prospects. You might win the lottery. You might get that job that seems like a bit of a stretch. You might get the crisp packet that’s hiding a tenner inside, and as long as you understand that your ‘luck’ is exactly that, no problem.

As Monty Python’s eponymous hero of ‘The Life of Brian’ once famously declared ‘You are all individuals’. We’d certainly like to think we are – from our choice of clothes, our holiday destinations or the cars we drive, right through to whether we’re a flat white person or more of the macchiato type.

We often say hindsight is 20/20 – looking back, it was perfectly clear all along. It’s often an expression of regret – we should have done X when in fact we did Y and now look what’s happened.

Anchoring Bias: Are you biased? No of course not. But then you would say that, wouldn’t you?

Our brains are strange. They can take something as predictably consistent and harmonious as numbers and turn them into a matter of subjectivity. The way that information is communicated to us can have significant effects on the conclusions we draw.

There are many types of blind spot in everyday life – not being able to see the cyclist just behind your passenger side, the two glasses of wine you neglected to include in your calorie counting, the way you listen to someone else’s problems then respond by talking about yourself.

The human psyche is full of little quirks – strange behaviours that we can’t always account for and in some cases we aren’t even aware of. They’re not just nature’s little jokes though, very often we display hard-wired behaviours that evolution has put in place for good reason, to help us out of situations that we wouldn’t consciously react to quickly enough.

Human beings like to sort things – we like to create order, we like to know where things are. We have a built-in need to spot patterns, which is why we like to sort music into genres, pore over the season record of our favourite football team or, for those of us old enough, arrange our CDs and DVDs in alphabetical order.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mary Schmich famously said, “Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.”

In an ideal world, we’d all make sensible, carefully calculated decisions about our money. We’d leave aside our emotions and decide our next steps based on facts, iterative learning and the evidence placed before us.

Metis Ireland is delighted to be shortlisted for two awards in the upcoming LPI awards.

After some time spent Googling the number 17, there’s not much in the way of memorable facts about it. It’s the atomic number of chlorine, the number of sides in a heptadecagon and the number of syllables in a haiku… but otherwise it’s a pretty ordinary number.