Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Nearly 200 cognitive biases affect our decision-making.
- The codex groups the biases based on 4 major “problems”.
- The sheer amount of biases teaches us “humility,” says one of the Codex’s creators.
Perhaps aside from mythical spiritual figures, 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 on how to react. And even the most self-conscious of us, who are trying actively to be aware of anything that can affect our judgements, cannot escape the full spectrum of internal prejudices. To help remedy this, at least by providing a fuller accounting of what goes on in your head, one 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 minds make decisions, we can be mindful of the inherent inaccuracies and fallacies and hopefully act with more fairness and grace.
“You look at this overwhelming array of cognitive biases and distortions, and realize how there are so many things that come between us and objective reality,” Manoogian explained The Huffington Post. “One of the most overwhelming things to me that came out of this project is humility.”
The four mental problems that biases hep us address are divided up this way:
PROBLEM 1: TOO MUCH INFORMATION
The first conundrum that leads to biases is that there’s simply too much information out there in the world. While we do our best to deal with the onslaught of stimuli that come at us through our senses, there will be always information that’s outside of what we can know at any given moment. You simply cannot know well what happens on the other side of the world, in another part of the galaxy, or even at another point in time. There’s always a limitation to your mind’s grasp, with much of what goes on being beyond its capacity to process.
To deal with this, your brain filters out information that is useful to you and tries to ignore the rest. It does so according to these factors, singled out by Benson:
* “We notice things that are already primed in memory or repeated often.”
Indeed, if something has already been in our memories and we’re used to seeing that issue a certain way, that’s how our brain is likely to react to it again. The biases that stem from this are plenty – the Attentional Bias, for example, that tells us to perceive events through our recurring thoughts at that time. This prevents us from considering alternate paths and possibilities.
Our biases that result from this kind of thinking include the context effects, the mood-congruent memory bias, or the empathy gap, which makes us underestimate the influence of visceral drives on our attitudes and actions.
* “Bizarre/funny/visually-striking/anthropomorphic things stick out more than non-bizarre/unfunny things.”
Our brains prefer to notice things that are in some ways unusual and unexpected, while ignoring ordinary information. That’s how we get the Bizarreness effect, Humor effect, and the Negativity bias.
* “We notice when something has changed.”
We look at how much something has changed more than what the new value of this something is if it was presented by itself. Cue the Focusing effect, Money illusion, Conservatism, or Distinction bias.
* “We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs.”
Everyone’s familiar…
The post This giant cognitive bias codex will transform your understanding of yourself appeared first on FeedBox.