Biases, Errors in decision making and simple 2-steps to fix it !

We in our lives take decisions at every step, there is no escape from that. Even not taking a decision at times is a decision we make. We judge people, situations, and things around consciously or subconsciously. Sometimes these judgments are logical, thought through and sometimes these are without any base, logic, just random irrational behavior we as humans exhibit. These are as a result of multiple biases we have.

These biases are there in each one of us and we encounter it on a day to day basis. Have a look at some other biases that you would have come across :

Confirmation bias

The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

Hindsight bias

Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.

Curse of knowledge

When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.

Dunning Kruger Effect

It is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as greater than it is.

Racial Bias

Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown and so many more black people have been killed in encounters with police in America the last two years as a result of some of our racial biases. So don’t think of biases as harmless, it can sometimes cost innocent lives.

In an experiment, researchers showed pictures to black people and asked them which ones would they trust more. These were pictures of black and white guys randomly placed.

Results were shocking as people trusted only 30% of Black guys, whereas in case of white guys, this percentage was 70%. And mind you, there were black people in this experiment. So we have biases even more deep-rooted than we think.

There are 100s of such biases that we have and don’t know about these. A cognitive bias refers to the systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.

Why do we even have these biases?

As mentioned in the article by Buster, here are few qualities in the universe that limit out intelligence.

• Too much information
• Not enough sense
• Not enough time and resources
• Memory is limited

So, all the biases created in our mind are workarounds to these limitations. Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow explains two different systems in the brain:

System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious

System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

It is system 1 that forms decisions, and that system is emotional, subconscious, rely on nature and intuition. It is this system that tries to find workarounds to our intelligence and analytical limitations by forming some intuitions which work perfectly fine in some cases but are completely flawed in other cases.

Can we fix these biases in decision making?

The answer to a large extent lies in how system 1 takes decisions. Like mentioned previously, decisions are driven by system 1 which is fast, emotional and relies on intuition. So, there is a value in understanding how this intuition is developed.

Intuition is a function of inputs(i), experiences(e), mental processing(m).

Intuition = f(i,e,m)

You must have noticed that we generally don’t get intuitions in domains that we have never been associated with. What is creating these intuitions and biases are these inputs and personal experiences.

WYSIATI — What You See is all there is

A lot of information that enters the brain is processed by System 2. Since there is a lot of information around, and at times brain has to do a lot of data analysis, so system 2 does that and creates an insight, and that insight gets stored and is kept handy in System 1.That is how System 1 is able to take faster decisions as it is not looking at data but just the insights.

Similarly, sometimes there is not enough data, but System 2 with that limited data does extrapolation of the data, and stores that extrapolated data insight in System 1.

All this extrapolated/crunched data analysis and insights in System 1 equips it to for faster decision making.

All this stuff is amazing and the whole system seems to be super-evolved, but then where is the problem?

The issue is that while deciding fast, System 1 is unable to attribute a credibility to the source of data, the kind of data, the amount of data from where the intuition was created. It just gives a decision.

Now that we know what causes these biases and intuitions, the Important question is:

How can we overcome these biases?

Step 1: Knowing your bias

The first step is to understand that everyone has these cognitive biases. Even you have these biases, even you are subjected to same beliefs, errors that everyone else is. As I write this article, I know that even I am not spared from a lot of these biases. No matter how much you know about these biases, just knowing is not enough.

In case of a turbulence, you will always want the plane to be having a male pilot. These are very deep-rooted in our psyche and by merely knowing that this is a bias, won’t really change much. But knowing that you are biased is the first step to overcoming the bias.

2. Disassociating the association

This is the most important step. Biases in our mind exist as these associations or links.

|Stranger — Danger|

|Women Driver — Bad|

Similarly, we have associations in our mind for black people, Muslims, even Indians, specific castes etc

Disassociating this association for example in case of stranger bias can mean, talking to enough strangers to a point you know that strangers are helpful, nice people.They are no different from us. So the danger association breaks.

Similarly knowing enough good female drivers personally, will break your association of female drivers being bad.

Most of the people haven’t known any black people or Muslims for that matter. Their notion of these people is on the basis of what they see in media. And as earlier mentioned in the post, what you see is all there is (WYSIATI)

If someone has a good friend who is a black or a Muslim, there is no way that he or she will have the stereotype portrayed by media.

Ferguson incident, Islamophobia, all are the manifestation of your biases.

Make a black friend, a Muslim friend and all the wrong associations, biases and notions will be removed and new associations are created.

Intuitions are a function of inputs, experiences so you need to give your mind more experiences to develop new intuitions, and break old biases.

Just remember, WYSIATI — what you see is all there is. So,

See More, Experience more

This article is originally published on medium: link

It is written after researching and reading about biases and psychology from a lot of sources. I could not add a lot of things in the article as it was already getting too long. If you want to know/discuss anything in detail, feel free to reach out or comment on this article.

Also, If you liked reading the article, do share and like so other may stumble upon it too :)