Amanda Montell has come on Marketplace a few times about the cult of work. We talked about why culty workplaces, like Neiman Marcus in the ‘80s, are so effective. We’ve also talked about the downsides: A cult-like job can be really hard to leave after all the time and energy you’ve put into it. 

There’s another word for that way of thinking: The sunk-cost fallacy. It’s one of many cognitive biases Montell explores in her latest book, “The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality.” These mental shortcuts were meant to help human beings survive, but in modern times they tend to cloud our judgment.

In the book, her podcast and now-touring “Big Magical Cult Show,” Montell uses these biases to understand Taylor Swift stans, toxic work habits, Instagram healers, bad relationships and much more. 

“Magical Overthinking” is a breezy and entertaining read that resonated with us coming off our latest season on the cost of self-improvement, so we called up Montell to chat about it. Read some edited excerpts of that conversation below.

This Is Uncomfortable: This new book is a lot more personal, and you frame a lot of these cognitive biases in your own experience. How did you get interested in putting a name to what you were going through? 

Amanda Montell: The seeds for my interest in cognitive biases were actually planted while I was writing “Cultish.” As I was reading the literature on cult influence, I kept coming across terms like “confirmation bias” and “sunk-cost fallacy” as playing a role in how followers of Scientology and the Children of God decided to join these groups and stay much longer than made sense to anyone, including and especially themselves.

But as I was reading about that, I couldn’t help but notice how many of these cognitive biases applied directly to my own irrational behaviors, and so much of the general illogic I was noticing in the zeitgeist. So I started to examine the literature on cognitive biases a little bit more, and as it turns out, hundreds and hundreds of them have been described over the years. My background is not in behavioral economics or psychology, so I felt like the only way that I could pull off writing about cognitive biases was if I brought my personal stories and vulnerability to the table, because I could see how they directly applied to some mistake that I had made, or some irrationality in other people’s behavior that had been plaguing me.

TIU: Your background is in linguistics, and in the book and other interviews you say these biases are supercharged by the internet and the “language of capitalism.” What do you mean by that?

Montell: I mean, there is so much intensely competitive, almost war-like language that seeps into our decision-making. I couldn’t help but notice how our concept of value and currency has really become warped.

A lot of these cognitive biases are rooted in some kind of adaptive benefit. The reason why we developed these psychological shortcuts was to make sense of the world enough to survive it. Our culture has outpaced those once very useful mental magic tricks, and that applies to value and currency in ways that I had not been able to quantify before.

So there’s a chapter in the book that talks about zero-sum bias, or our false intuition that another person’s gain directly means your loss. And this stems from generations of stiff resource competition. You can imagine a time in human history when we were living in small communities and you really would be in direct material competition for resources, like mates and food, with people of your age and your same sex. But now we’re mapping those intuitions onto much more abstract forms of currency, like clout and followers and coolness and success.

So I found that, particularly living in digital-age capitalism, when it is already so hard to evaluate how much your time is worth, how much your creativity is worth, how much is that worth in money? In prestige? How much is that worth in, like, some other obscure transaction on Instagram? Anyone reading this probably has grown up in capitalism, and it’s really hard to resist those ingrained competitive instincts. It’s even harder to resist them when we are conditioned by a society where you have to grow or else you die.

TIU: In the zero-sum chapter, you talk about your career pivot from beauty editor to author. You say that comparing yourself to other people online was kind of breaking your brain. That didn’t go away, your algorithm just changed —

Montell: It got worse!

TIU: It got worse, so how do you fight back that instinct, and manage that zero-sum thinking?

Montell: Well, wherever you go, there you are. So I came across a lot of research for that chapter indicating that women are more prone to make upward comparisons and downward identifications. So when a relatively young woman scrolls through her Instagram feed, or even just, like, enters a physical space, we are more likely to clock those we perceive as threats. Men are predicted to do the opposite. So there’s, like, a real psychological battle, self-esteem wise, that a young woman encounters every time they log on to their feed.

There I go again with that war-like language — like, it’s not a battle. My life is not on the line. But your nervous system doesn’t know that when you log on and you clock all of these “threats” in scare quotes. So when I was working in the beauty industry, my value there had a lot to do with my appearance, and my Instagram algorithm knew that. And so daily I was comparing myself to influencers on rooftops wearing the latest Reformation. Once I pivoted to writing subject matter that I cared a little bit more about than eye cream — I do care about eye cream, but not that much — I thought, “Phew, I will be released now from comparison purgatory.” But then, instead I was being served young, hot, brilliant Brooklyn essayists who had more pedigree than me. Now I was comparing not my appearance, but something more existential — my career and my ability to put ideas into the world. And also my appearance. So that was tough.

And how did I manage it? Yeah, well, I would love to say that I just, like, quit social media, but I actually think that might be, like, an avoidant tactic. Instead, I took a page out of Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s book. [Ann] wrote a viral piece for The Cut in 2013 that talked about “shine theory,” or this notion that, you know, another person’s light does not dim yours inherently. If you come across a woman who you find beautiful and brilliant and intimidating, don’t block her, befriend her.

TIU: We’re big fans of Ann and Aminatou around here! I’m wondering, you talk a lot in the book about ways that cognitive biases can hamper our careers. Are there ways these survival instincts can kind of inadvertently help us in our financial and work lives?

Montell: I mean, I certainly think that an awareness of these biases can help us generate a lot more compassion for those people that we may work with, who we might otherwise write off as evil. We all have a co-worker or two whose behavior does not make sense to us, who we might disregard as villainous or maybe has a personality disorder. And maybe those things are true, but I have actually found that becoming aware of the biases has allowed me to navigate people’s personalities and stressors a little bit more effectively. Because I know so often that a person’s negative behavior towards me is not actually about me. It’s about their survival instincts, which is not always an excuse — especially if they are mistreating you — but it is an explanation.

TIU: In your intro to the book, you talk about all these methods you tried to quiet your overthinking: “I visited a petting zoo for adults. I tried learning to meditate from a British computer voice. I stocked up on an unregulated nutrition powder called Brain Dust.” Later on you learn about the “additive solution bias.” Can you talk about that?

Montell: The additive solution bias thing is one of those studies that has stuck with me the most after having learned about it. It describes our natural inclination to want to solve a problem by adding variables to the equation, an impulse that is also exacerbated by living in a consumer society. Basically, there’s a study where participants were presented with a puzzle that they could solve by either adding or removing colored blocks. The majority of participants decided to solve the problem by adding a whole bunch of colored blocks, when the much more efficient solution was just to take one single block away. Almost no one went for that.

This bias shows up in so many contexts of my life, from high-stakes to low-stakes. I just moved, and my additive solution bias was raging because I would be, like, looking at all the mess and all the clutter that I’ve acquired over the years. And every single time, my impulse would be, like, “Oh my god, I need to get, like, drawer organizers. I need to get those acrylic toiletry bins or whatever.” No, just throw that shit away, or give it away, or whatever. That is not our first idea when encountering a problem, so often.

I will say there are some biases that are so potent that even an awareness of them will not help. But for additive solution bias, and for even for the sunk-cost fallacy and for zero-sum bias, like, these are some that really, I think, can be sort of mitigated by just knowing about them. 

TIU: You also mention a trip to Sicily where you tried to de-stress. No regrets about that additive solution? How are you personally managing your overthinking these days?

Montell: No regrets on Sicily. I mean, of course, that’s never a mistake. I have felt just so fortunate to be able to talk to so many brilliant scholars of mental health and behavioral economics and brain science for this book. Whenever I feel truly lost in a thought spiral, I return to some of our interviews and some of the advice that they offered. It really is very soothing, because it’s easy to feel like your thought spirals are real and that they are a personal problem. Like, “I am defective because some salty Instagram comment sent me into existential hell for a week.” But there are actually these explanations, and being able to talk to all these experts about them has been really validating.

📚 Our next Uncomfortable Book Club pick 📚

In two weeks, we’ll talk with Sarah Thankam Mathews about her debut novel “All This Could Be Different.” We’ll be sure to cover awkward money convos with friends, mutual aid and Milwaukee’s history of “sewer socialism.” Have you read it? Send us your thoughts and we might include them in the convo!

The Comfort Zone

What our team is into this week

• Can’t get enough of this topic? Here are several more cognitive biases that hit your pocketbook directly.
• People are paying big money to try and get back with their exes. 😬
• If you’re cuffed up, here’s a good guide to combining finances with a partner.
• A good video essay on MLMs, one of our favorite topics around here.
• We loved hearing Ayo Edebiri on Keke Palmer’s podcast.
• She had great Criterion closet picks too.
• Zoë is hooked on “Clipped.”
• From The Atlantic, and recommended by one of our meat-free colleagues: “America Has Never Really Known What to Make of Vegetarians”
• How to make more work friends (or just be less lonely working from home).
• We loved Embedded’s “new rules for Facebook Marketplace.”
• Here’s a gift link to the latest Ethicist column: “Is It OK to Get Food Stamps When You’re Just Pursuing Your Passion?” 
• Let’s close out with a song: The Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”

This newsletter was written by Tony Wagner and edited by Zoë Saunders and Carrie Barber.

Stories You Might Like

Five signs your workplace might be turning into a cult

Neiman Marcus was kinda culty — is that a bad thing?

Anxieties about food and parenting transcend class

This is the cost of being your best self

COVID-19 vaccine for kids under 5 could be available soon

Bed-and-breakfast is “a labor of love” for Washington owner