Cognitive Biases Psychology Essay Help

Cognitive Biases Psychology Essay Help

A cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you, and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. Biases are unconscious and automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. Cognitive biases can be caused by a number of different things, such as heuristics (mental shortcuts), social pressures, and emotions.

• Some of these biases are related to memory. The way you remember an event may be biased for a number of reasons and that, in turn, can lead to biased thinking and decision-making.

• Other cognitive biases might be related to problems with attention. Since attention is a limited resource, people have to be selective about what they pay attention to in the world around them.

Broadly speaking, bias is a tendency to lean in favor of or against a person, group, idea, or thing, usually in a way that is unfair. Biases are natural — they are a product of human nature — and they don’t simply exist in a vacuum or in our mind’s — they affect the way we make decisions and act. In psychology, there are two main branches of biases: conscious and unconscious. Conscious bias, or explicit bias, is intentional — you are aware of your attitudes and the behaviors that result from them. Explicit bias can be good because it helps provide you with a sense of identity and can lead you to make good decisions (for example, being biased towards healthy foods). However, these biases can often be dangerous when they take the form of conscious stereotyping.

On the other hand, unconscious bias, or cognitive bias, represents the set of biases that are unintentional — you are not aware of your attitudes and the behaviors that result from them. Cognitive bias is often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing — we receive roughly 11 million bits of information per second, but we can only process about 40 bits of information per second.

Therefore, we often rely on mental shortcuts (called heuristics) to help make sense of the world with relative speed. As such, these errors tend to arise from problems related to thinking: memory, attention, and other mental mistakes. Cognitive biases can be beneficial because they do not require much mental effort and can allow you to make decisions relatively quickly, but like with conscious biases, unconscious biases can also take the form of harmful prejudice that serves to hurt an individual or a group.

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Types of cognitive Bias

Few of the most common types of cognitive biases that can distort your thinking:

Actor-observer bias: This is the tendency to attribute your own actions to external causes while attributing other people's behaviors to internal causes. For example, you attribute your high cholesterol level to genetics while you consider others to have a high level due to poor diet and lack of exercise.

Attentional bias: This is the tendency to pay attention to some things while simultaneously ignoring others. For example, when making a decision on which car to buy, you may pay attention to the look and feel of the exterior and interior, but ignore the safety record and gas mileage.

Availability heuristic: This is placing greater value on information that comes to your mind quickly. You give greater credence to this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the future.

Confirmation bias: This is favoring information that conforms to your existing beliefs and discounting evidence that does not conform

False consensus effect: This is the tendency to overestimate how much other people agree with you.

Functional fixedness: This is the tendency to see objects as only working in a particular way. For example, if you don't have a hammer, you never consider that a big wrench can also be used to drive a nail into the wall. You may think you don't need thumbtacks because you have no corkboard on which to tack things, but not consider their other uses. This could extend to people's functions, such as not realizing a personal assistant has skills to be in a leadership role.

Halo effect: Your overall impression of a person influences how you feel and think about their character. This especially applies to physical attractiveness influencing how you rate their other qualities.

Misinformation effect: This is the tendency for post-event information to interfere with the memory of the original event. It is easy to have your memory influenced by what you hear about the event from others. Knowledge of this effect has led to a mistrust of eyewitness information.

Optimism bias: This bias leads you to believe that you are less likely to suffer from misfortune and more likely to attain success than your peers.

Self-serving bias: This is the tendency to blame external forces when bad things happen and give yourself credit when good things happen. For example, when you win a poker hand it is due to your skill at reading the other players and knowing the odds, while when you lose it is due to getting dealt a poor hand.

The Dunning-Kruger effect: This is when people who believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. For example, when they can't recognize their own incompetence.

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What is Zero Risk Bias?

It relates to our preference for absolute certainty. We tend to opt for situations where we can completely eliminate risk, seeking solace in the figure of 0%, over alternatives that may actually offer greater risk reduction.

Zero Risk Bias Examples:

When sports fans know the outcome of a game, they often question certain decisions coaches make that they otherwise would not have questioned or second guessed. And fans are also quick to remark that they knew their team was going to win or lose, but, of course, they only make this statement after their team actually did win or lose.

In the workplace, people attribute internal factors when they are hired for a job but external factors when they are fire. And in the office, itself, workplace conflicts are given external attributions and successes, whether it be a persuasive presentation or a promotion, are awarded internal explanations.

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