How Our Minds Can Trick Us
There are many ways that our mind can trick us, if we do not pay attention to and question the validity of our thoughts. Whereas '10 Ways to Think Smarter' introduced Cognitive Distortions, the focus of this article is to introduce Cognitive Biases.
Cognitive biases are a result of our brain's attempt to simplify information processing. Biases often work as 'rules of thumb' that help us humans make sense of the world and reach decisions with relative speed.
Sometimes this is useful—for example, if you are walking down a dark alley at night and spot a shadow that seems to be following you, a cognitive bias might lead you to assume that it is a mugger and that you need to exit the alley as quickly as possible.
Other times, however, processing information without reflective judgement because of our cognitive biases can lead to decision making that is nowhere near as clean and accurate as it could be. As it is our decisions that ultimately shape our life, enhancing the quality of our decision making and thought processing (often an overlooked skill) has a profound effect on the quality of our lives.
Once we understand how cognitive biases can contribute to poor decision making, we can start mitigating these biases and improving our judgments.
Below, I have listed 5 common Cognitive Biases to be aware of:
- Confirmation Bias—is the tendency to seek out, interpret, judge and remember information so that it supports one’s pre-existing views and ideas, i.e., trying to find only sources that justify what one already believes about a subject. The result is a one-sided view of a situation; not looking at evidence that contradicts one's preconceived notions. This often plays out in politics—where a person only cites evidence showing the positive things a political leader has done, and disregarding all the negative, or vice-versa.
- The Halo Effect—The halo effect helps explains why first impressions are so important. This phenomenon describes how a positive impression about someone for one reason will lead to positive impressions about other aspects of this person. An example of this can be attractive physical appearance influencing how we perceive someone’s intelligence. A study by Landy and Sigall demonstrated just that: students were asked to write essays, and then a photo of an attractive or unattractive actor was added to the assignment. The participants that had photos of attractive actors with their paper received significantly better grades than the others.
- The Availability Heuristic—The tendency to estimate the probability of something happening based on how many examples readily come to mind is known as the availability heuristic. An example would be when the media show shark attacks, or terrorist attacks or plane crashes, and people are scared to swim in the ocean, or fly in a plane, or even visit a public area with a lot of people. In actual fact, driving to the beach, the airport or the public area entailed vastly more risk.
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect—A cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize—that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man..., "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
- The Ostrich Effect—A cognitive bias that causes people to avoid information that they perceive as potentially unpleasant. For example, the ostrich effect can cause someone to avoid looking at their bills, because they’re worried about seeing how far behind they are on their payments. The main reason why people avoid certain information or tasks is to avoid the unpleasant emotional impact that they expect it to lead to, however this ostrich effect is a very dangerous cognitive bias—and can lead to promoting the very unpleasant emotions/situations we are trying to avoid: An example would be, when it comes to the ostrich effect in the domain of personal health, fear of receiving bad news about one’s health can lead people to avoid seeking out health information that, ironically, may be crucial to maintain our health.
As humans, we didn't evolve to make logical decisions—we evolved to survive. And cognitive biases may have helped serve that purpose. But the modern world presents many scenarios that demand more rational calculations.
The first step to overcoming the potentially negative effects of these biases, is awareness that they exist.
The second step is to continually assess our thinking processes—in other words, to engage in meta-cognitive practices, which is literally thinking about one’s thinking.
In future articles, I will dive into step 2 :)
Peace :)
PS At Progressive English, we have a multitude of tools, resources and workshops/coaching which focus on the topic of 'Clean Thinking.' Methods to deal effectively with Cognitive Biases are just one such toll in the toolbox.
