"57 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up How We Think"

[applegrove]

57 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up How We Think

by Gus Lubin at Business Insider

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-biases-2013-8?op=1#ixzz2cqOuUl84

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People aren't as rational as we would like to think.

From attentional bias — where someone focuses on only one or two of several possible outcomes — to zero-risk bias — where we place too much value on reducing a small risk to zero — the sheer number of cognitive biases that affect us every day is staggering.

Understanding these biases is key to suppressing them — and needless to say, it is good to try to be rational in most cases. How else can you have any sort of control over investments, purchases, and all other decisions that you make in your life?

To convey the breadth of cognitive biases, we've picked out 57 of the most notable ones from a much longer list on Wikipedia. [Aimee Groth contributed to an earlier version of this article.]


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[Warpy]

1. Some of these biases are protective

because accepting nothing but the truth would make most us suicidal.

I retreat into the Ostrich Effect frequently, especially during meditation. It centers me and allows me to cope when I emerge.

I don't fancy myself powerful enough to change much of anything about my life and the conditions under which I must live it.

I do fancy that I occasionally cause folks to ask a few hard questions. If I do, that's enough for me.

[The2ndWheel]

2. Sounds like we know why everyone is crazy

Conservatism bias:
Where people believe prior evidence more than new evidence or information that has emerged.

Recency:
The tendency to weight the latest information more heavily than older data.

Seems like we can't really win.

Plus, with...

Information bias:
The tendency to seek information when it does not affect action. More information is not always better.

Maybe understanding the biases to be the key to suppressing them isn't the right way to go. It might not be better to have that understanding. Maybe that understanding's usefulness is being overvalued, and the limitations to that understanding are being undervalued, like the Pro-innovation bias. Can't do that though, since that could be considered status quo bias. Who who wants that though, since sticking with the same old stuff is probably confirmation bias?

And round and round we go.

[Electric Monk]

3. The Global War On Terror = zero-risk bias