Table of Contents
What Are Cognitive Biases?
Let’s start with a question, what are cognitive biases?
Cognitive biases are errors in memory or judgment that are caused by the inappropriate use of cognitive processes.
We all can agree that our memories are not perfect. We like to think that we remember events correctly but sometimes we are proven otherwise.
Memory is influenced by:
• The set and setting in which it occurs
• Events that happen to us afterward
• Cognitive processes, we use to remember.
And all those can lay traps for us when it comes to achieving our goal of accurately remembering stuff.
Though the good thing is, being aware that those cognitive biases exist can help us to avoid them. Hence we can stop being the person who believes is right just to be proven wrong in front of everyone.
But what’s even better, the following cognitive biases may loosen our desire to be right all the time altogether.
Life is much easier if we don’t try being right so hard.
Anyway, here we go with ten common cognitive biases that influence your perception and memory.
List of Common Cognitive Biases
The following list of cognitive biases is not complete. There are definitely a lot more but these are some of the most common ones. So take note and see which one is most common in your life.
Source Monitoring
Source monitoring refers to the ability to identify the source of a memory.
Have you ever had the experience where you asked yourself: “Did this really happen?”
If you are fantasy-prone and like to daydream, you might know the feeling when you are unsure if something really happened, or if it was a dream.
Another example is when you are sure you remember the information from real life but you don’t know where you heard or read it.
You might forget the source because it was unreliable. But you still remember the information and thus become convinced that the information is true. Our attitude changes with time when we forget the source of the information.
This is called the sleeper effect.
Or you might also forget that you have learned a piece of information somewhere and mistakenly assume we have created it ourselves. This can result in unintended plagiarism, called Cryptomnesia.
This has happened to many people before. Among those Friedrich Nitzsche, Hellen Keller, and George Harrison.
You can read more on accidental plagiarism in this New York Times article.
Uncertainty about the source of a memory may lead to mistakes in decisions and judgments.
Confirmation Bias
Among the common cognitive biases, this is one that we all surely have tapped into.
Schemas are a way for us humans to help us remember information by organizing it coherently. However, as much as they can help improve our memory, they can also lead to cognitive biases.
And one of those is confirmation bias.
This is the tendency to verify and confirm our existing memories rather than to challenge and disconfirm them.
We tend to remember information that fits our schemas better than information that disconfirms them, which is also a reason why stereotypes exist.
We usually seek out and interpret information, and ask questions in a way that confirms our schemas.
When we, for instance, think a person is extroverted we might ask her what places she likes to go, making it more likely to confirm our beliefs.
Another example of a confirmation bias is the halo effect. This is the habit of positive impressions of a person in one area to positively influence our opinion in other areas.
To give you an example. If you see an attractive person you are more likely to assume that this person is also intelligent, successful, and otherwise capable.
The moral is once beliefs become established, they become self-confirming and difficult to change. And if we rely too much on schemas our ability to “think outside the box” might be inhibited.
Functional Fixedness
This cognitive bias is pretty straightforward. Functional fixedness is when schemas prevent us from seeing and using information in new ways. This is not only true for information but for objects as well.
If you have a very strict belief that an object has this one purpose, you’ll have difficulties seeing its other potential uses.
Hence, it might be hard for you to see that your toothbrush can also serve as a toilet cleaning tool. Although you probably shouldn’t use it for brushing your teeth again afterward.
Functional fixedness may result in impaired creativity by the overuse of traditional thinking.
Here it can help to step back and observe something from a new angle. What tools in your life may be able to serve another purpose you haven’t yet considered?
Misinformation Effect
The misinformation effect occurs when new but incorrect information influences existing accurate memories. This new information can then distort our original memories. We then don’t know what the real information is and what came later.
In an experiment by Loftus and Palmer (1974), participants viewed a film of a traffic accident. Afterward, they were randomly assigned to answer one of three questions:
“About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”
“About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?”
“About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?”
They all watched the same accident. Yet participants who had been asked the “smashed” question estimated the highest average speed. Participants who had been asked the “contacted” question estimated the lowest average speed.
Misinformation can not only distort our memory for events that have actually happened. It may also lead us to remember information that never happened.
Loftus and colleagues asked parents to provide them with a description of events that did and did not happen. Then the researchers asked the children to imagine both events (without telling the kids which events were real or made-up).
More than half of the children created stories for at least one of the made-up events. They even insisted that the events happened although the researchers told them they could not have happened.
And even adults are susceptible to such manipulations. Some even argue that procedures used by therapists to retrieve hidden memories are more likely to implant false memories.
Like with most things in life I don’t think it is a black and white thing.
However, many people have been imprisoned based on claims about recovered memory of child sexual abuse. Thus, the accuracy of recovered memory certainly has societal implications.
Overconfidence
Ok be honest here, how confident are you that your memories are correct?
When it comes to our own memories, we are often not only confident but overconfident.
This is another one of the common cognitive biases you have probably encountered in yourself or others. Overconfidence is our tendency to be more certain about the accuracy of our memories and judgments than we should be.
Studies have shown, that we usually overestimate the accuracy of our predictions in how other people will react in a specific situation. In fact, confidence doesn’t seem to be a determinant of accuracy.
Consider this the next time you assume you know how a person will react, even if it is a friend or family member.
People usually believe that they remember a vivid and emotional memory of an unusual event very well. This is known as a flashbulb memory. Even the accuracy of memories, which have great personal significance, declines over time.
In a study, participants were asked to recall their memories of learning about 9/11 1,6, or 32 weeks later. Their recollections became less accurate but their confidence in the memories remained. After 32 weeks they were overconfident.
Here as well we have societal implications. Eyewitnesses may be very confident that they have identified a suspect, even though their memories are incorrect.
Salience
Another potential for cognitive bias occurs when some stimuli, (e.g., those that are colorful, moving, or unexpected) attract our attention, which makes it more likely we remember them.
Let’s say you want to buy a new phone.
Your decision is between an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy. After reading reviews and consumer reports you finally decide on the iPhone. However, the next day your friend shows you her new Samsung Galaxy. You play around with it a little and it seems pretty cool.
She then proceeds to explain to you how the Samsung Galaxy is a lot better than the iPhone. She tells you her friend bought one and the battery died after the warranty expired and how she would never buy an iPhone.
Would you still buy the iPhone?
Logically, the information you just got from your friend isn’t really that relevant. One opinion doesn’t change the overall rating of the two phones.
However, you just had the chance to use her Samsung Galaxy. And the information she gave you was emotionally charged. Both are highly salient. Your friend’s information is right in your hand while the reviews are opinions of strangers on a screen.
In such cases, we often ignore the more important information and decide in favor of the more salient information.
To sum this cognitive bias up. We often base our judgments on a single salient event while ignoring hundreds of other equally informative events that we do not see.
Representativeness Heuristic
What are heuristics?
Heuristics are information-processing strategies that are useful in many cases but lead to errors when misapplied.
Now let’s talk about what happens when we apply (or misapply) the representativeness heuristic.
This is the tendency to make judgments according to how well the event matches our expectations.
One classic example is the gambler’s fallacy:
After a coin has come up “heads” many times in a row, we may mistakenly think that the next flip is more likely to be “tails”. Let’s be honest here, haven’t we all been in this situation?
Availability Heuristic
Another heuristic that can lead to cognitive bias is the availability heuristic.
This is the idea that things that come to mind easily are seen as more common.
For example, the report of shark attacks, plane crashes, and child abductions often make us believe that such events are more common than they truly are.
Or we may overestimate the frequency of traffic jams in our own area because they are so easy to recall.
One example by the psychologists Tversky & Kahneman:
“If a random word is taken from an English text, is it more likely that the word starts with a K, or that K is the third letter?”
It is definitely easier to think of words starting with K than it is to think of words in which K is the third letter. Thus, most people would assume there are more words with K in the beginning.
Yet, there are three times more words with K in the third position than words that begin with K.
One last example for good measure.
We may think that our friends are nice people because we see them when they are around their friends (us). And of course, they are nice to their friends.
Check out this article on the availability heuristic.
Cognitive Accessibility
Another common cognitive bias is cognitive accessibility.
This is the idea that some memories are more highly activated than others.
For instance, you probably know someone who is all about eating healthy food. All he can talk about is healthy nutrition and the latest findings on what’s healthy and what’s not.
This then is a highly accessible construct for him.
Eating healthy is important to his self-concept. Many of his goals are related to eating healthy. He might think that every person who is also eating healthy must be a good person.
Other highly accessible schemas might be drinking good coffee, any type of sports, or environmental issues. If you think about it, you’ll probably find a highly accessible schema for yourself as well.
Another classic example many of us know from school is that we may think that we contributed more to a project than we really did. This is so because it’s easy to remember our own contributions.
Counterfactual Thinking
The last common cognitive bias on this list is called counterfactual thinking.
This is our tendency to replay events in a “what might have been” matter.
If we can imagine a better outcome than what actually happened, we may get sad. On the flip side, if we can imagine a worse outcome, we may be happy and satisfied.
This is common in sports competitions.
The silver medalist seems less happy than the bronze medalist. This is for the reason that the silver medalist is disappointed about having finished second, whereas the bronze medalist is happy about having finished third rather than fourth (1).
You might have experienced counterfactual thinking in your own life. We all know the experience of getting really close to finishing something and then feeling like we really need to finish it.
For example, you might be more devastated about your car breaking down close to home than if it breaks down at the beginning of your journey.
We feel particularly bad about events that might not have occurred if only a small change had occurred before them.
But we all know we can’t change the past. So, as hard as it sometimes is, accepting and letting go is the way to go.
How to Avoid Common Cognitive Biases
As you have probably realized, while reading this article, most of us are subject to cognitive biases. And although they are pretty common, they are not impossible to control.
Even just being aware of their existence can reduce the possibility of falling into the trap of one of those common cognitive biases.
You can ask yourself the following questions to become clear about your own potential biases:
• Was I ever uncertain if an event really happened or if I just imagined it? How did I resolve this?
• What are some of my cognitive schemas? Do I strongly identify with a topic? How does this influence my information processing and perception?
• What are some events where I was influenced by highly salient information? Do I value the opinion of friends more just because they are my friends?
Other suggestions to overcome cognitive biases:
• Take personal responsibility for your errors and mistakes of judgment
• Avoid making assumptions
• Check your ego: Are you overly invested?
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Although you now know about some common cognitive biases, you shouldn’t freak out about every little decision.
These are common cognitive biases for a reason. They are common. And most of these cognitive processes also have a positive side to them. They help us navigate the world with less mental effort.
Whenever you are in a high-stake situation or have to make an important decision take a step back and question your thinking and viewpoint.
Apart from that, it’s not a tragedy to fall victim to a cognitive bias. Most of the time it doesn’t mean the end of the world.
Luka
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