One idea: make a list of situations in which you trade off against 2+ qualities, notice if you've formed a collider bias, and explain to yourself what's going on. I'll try two:
Food can have more virtues. It can be cheap, easy to prepare, and different from what I've eaten recently. Weirdly enough, this means that the more potential virtues something has, the more likely you're going to consume something that entirely lacks a certain virtue. If I go to a single-price restaurant, where price, ease of preparation, and variety are held constant, tastiness and healthiness are the only ways I can make a selection and will be more important. By contrast, if I'm at home, how tasty and healthy the meal is can more often take a back seat to these other factors.
However, I'd also note that the reason we may not think too often about "collider bias" may be that most things are correlated. Price correlates with all the other virtues in just about everything you can consume. Excitement and stress seem likely to be correlated.
If X->Z<-Y, then X and Y are independent unless you're conditioning on Z. A relevant TAP might thus be:
This TAP unfortunately abstract because "things I'm currently conditioning on" isn't an easy thing to list, but it might help.
One way to "rewire" your brain is to wire in a quick check- how does selection/stratification/conditioning matter here?
But perhaps most important is to think causally. Sure, you can open up associations, but, theoretically, do they make sense? Why would obesity, conditional on having cardiovascular disease, reduce mortality? Addressing why rather than leaping to a bivariate causal conclusion is important. This is why scientists look for mechanisms and mechanism-implicating boundary conditions.
I call this subcategory of Berkson's paradox issues the conservation of virtue effect: when there is a filter somewhere for something like a sum of good qualities, then all good qualities are negatively correlated. Another major subcategory is the "if you observe something which has multiple possible explanations, those explanations are negatively correlated" effect. I don't think these two subtypes cover all the instances, but they do seem to cover a large fraction, and they aren't too difficult to internalize.
Zack M. Davis summarizes collider bias as follows:
Wikipedia gives a further example:
No crazy psychoanalysis, just a simple statistical artifact. (On a meta level, perhaps attractive people are meaner for some reason, but a priori, doesn't collider bias explain away the need for other explanations?)
This seems like it could be everywhere. Most things have more than one causal parent; if it has many parents, there's probably a pair which is independent. Then some degree of collider bias will occur for almost all probability distributions represented by the causal diagram, since collider bias will exist if P(¬A∧¬B)>0 (in the linked formalism). And if we don't notice it unless we make a serious effort to reason about the causal structure of a problem, then we might spend time arguing about statistical artifacts, making up theories to explain things which don't need explaining!
In The Book of Why, Judea Pearl speculates (emphasis mine):
But how is this done? Perhaps one simply meditates on the wisdom of causal diagrams, understands the math, and thereby comes to properly intuitively reason about colliders, or at least reliably recognize them.
This question serves two purposes: