Confirmation Bias.

When I played poker, I made a living of off the confirmation biases of others. Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs. For example, if you believe that during a full moon there is an increase in admissions to the emergency room where you work, you will take notice of admissions during a full moon, but be inattentive to the moon when admissions occur during other nights of the month. A tendency to do this over time unjustifiably strengthens your belief in the relationship between the full moon and accidents and other lunar effects. In poker it's the tendency to view one's wins as relevant and meaningful, but downplay or disregard one's losses. It's one of the reasons I used software to continually analyze my game. There's no kidding yourself when you have the mean win/loss rate of 250,000 hands looking you in the eye.
I think that poker may have destroyed my mind. In poker you are constantly playing a game of "What do I think he has, what does he think I have, what does he think I think he has, and what does he think I think he thinks I have. It gets pretty convoluted, but it pays off...in poker.
In real life, I'm having trouble shaking this thinking. I question every action of every one around me for what it really means, and I have a reverse confirmation bias. I tend to use selective thinking that confirms ulterior motives everywhere. I can quite easily convince myself that this is rational, and that on the contrary, the lack of an ulterior motive is irrational.
I analyze situations, find the worst case scenario for another person's thoughts or behaviour, then build up a system of associations and beliefs that make any best case scenario seem naive and optimistic.
Anyway, I'm rambling, not making much sense to myself, better go to bed as I have to be up in 5 hours to count for 3 hours.