Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Nearly 200 cognitive biases affect our decision-making.
- The sheer amount of biases should teach us humility.
- And we should recognize the essential role they play in life, as well.
Aside from mythical spiritual figures and biblical kings, humans are not objective in how they react to the world.
As much as we would like to be fair and impartial about how we deal with the situations that arise on a daily basis, we process them through a complex series of internal biases before deciding how to react. Even the most self-conscious of us cannot escape the full spectrum of internal prejudices.Brain biases can quickly become a hall of mirrors. How you understand and retain knowledge about cognitive shortcuts will determine what, if any, benefits you can derive from the substantial psychological science that’s been done around them. Here we take a look at different ways of understanding cognitive biases, and different approaches to learning from them. Enjoy!
The Peter Baumann approach
Originally a pioneer of German electronic dance music, Peter Baumann now devotes himself to exploring the science and philosophy of the human experience. To him, cognitive biases are everything and nothing.
There is nothing that is not a bias.
We prefer sweet food to bitter food, solid ground to unstable ground, and are imbued with cultural assumptions that help us live more peacefully in society. Noting that biases exist in the biological domain, Baumann frees cognitive bias from the trap of being views as an entirely mental phenomenon.
Biases do not obstruct a healthy or positive life.
Biases are shortcuts we’ve inherited through past generations. They are designed to help us to survive. Confirmation bias, for example, solve the problem of not being able to take in all the world’s information each time we make a decision. Of course, being closed off to new information is equally hazardous in modern society, where information is the currency of our knowledge-driven world.
Baumann’s favorite bias?
The uniqueness bias amuses him the most because it’s a bias that each person necessarily has. We all think of ouselves as unique because each person is at the center of their own existence. But interestingly, there are circles of uniqueness. People you have close relationships with are more unique than people you don’t know. Which of course has some obvious limitations as a reliable point of view.
What to do about biases
Listen better, says Baumann. Understanding the predispositions we bring to the table should make us more open to understanding other people’s points of view. If you’re not so special, not so right, not so perfect all the time, there’s a greater likelihood that you have something valuable to learn from others.
The Buster Benson approach
Benson/Manoogian III
Buster Benson (a marketing manager at Slack) decided to organize 175 known biases into a giant codex.
Benson (with help from illustrations by John Manoogian III), sorted biases for duplicates and grouped them into four larger categories, each called a “conundrum” or “problem”. All four of these limit our intelligence but are actually trying to be helpful. According to Benson, “Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy.” But the end result of utilizing such mental shortcuts, which are often useful, is that they also introduce errors into our thinking. By becoming aware of how our…
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