What Your Attachment Style Reveals & The Trouble with Predictions
4/20/202649 min
Choosing between two options can feel straightforward. Add a third—and suddenly the decision gets harder. Add more, and it can become overwhelming. There’s a surprising reason your brain struggles when options multiply, and it can quietly influence the choices you make every day. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/decoy-effect In every close relationship, there is an underlying pattern that shapes how you connect, respond, and react—your attachment style. It influences how you handle conflict, how secure you feel, and even who you’re drawn to. Dr. Amir Levine, psychiatrist, neuroscientist at Columbia University, and co-author of Attached (https://amzn.to/48CJBKV) and Secure (https://amzn.to/47TdTcd), explains the four primary attachment styles and how understanding yours—and your partner’s—can shed light on relationship dynamics that often feel confusing or frustrating. If you want to explore your own attachment style, you can take a quiz at: https://amirlevinemd.com/ Predictions are supposed to help us understand what’s coming next. But in many cases, they do something far stranger—they actually help shape the future they claim to forecast. And despite the confidence of experts, humans are notoriously bad at predicting what will happen, even in fields they know well. Carissa Véliz, associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford and author of Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (https://amzn.to/4mleiKt), explains why predictions are so unreliable, how they influence behavior, and why we should be more skeptical of them than we are. When you need advice or someone to truly understand what you’re going through, not all perspectives are equal. There’s evidence that people of a certain age—and life experience—may be better at offering empathy and insight than others. https://isr.umich.edu/news-events/news-releases/age-and-empathy-middle-aged-are-most-likely-to-feel-your-pain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Mike Carruthers· Host0:27
[upbeat music] Today on Something You Should Know, why adding more choices can completely mess up your decision making. Then, why it's so important to understand your attachment style and the attachment style of others.
Amir Levine· Guest0:46
Just knowing about these attachment styles, knowing that not everybody sees the world the way that you do, that people experience relationships differently, for me, that was a revelation. It's basically what led me to get into this area, both as a therapist and as a researcher.
Mike Carruthers· Host1:01
Also, who you should and shouldn't turn to for emotional support. And how predictions work, and they don't work the way you think.
Carissa Véliz· Guest1:11
If I predict that it will rain tomorrow, it will have no effect on whether it actually rains. But when I make a social prediction, that's very different because it changes the expectations of people if people believe me, and that changes that which I'm predicting.
Mike Carruthers· Host1:26
All this today on Something You Should Know.