Beware Of These Cognitive Biases!!

While you ask yourself what a cognitive bias is, this Wikipedia page can wonderfully explain it to you, in detail. We do not have the time nor the patience to research it. So the most effective way to learn about it is bit by bit. Dont worry life is long enough to show you all the cognitive biases that humans display.

For now think of cognitive biases as the direction of thoughts that tend to favor the mind for various psychological reasons.

Lets get down to the list: (I'll be using "mind" a lot in the context)

Halo Effect

• What?: Because of this bias, mind tends to assume attractive people as smart, friendly and fun to be with in real life.

• Why?: Its a mental shortcut to help the mind make decisions quickly.

• Ex.: Favouring attractive people to be leaders.

Spotlight Effect

• What?: Because of this bias, mind overestimates the number of people who are consciously paying attention to our actions.

• Why?: Mind is an egotist by nature. Its more focused on its own actions and thinks that others too are focused on it.

• Ex.: When you are in a crowd and while walking you accidently lost balance and got back at it. You feel embarassed.

Confirmation Bias

• What?: Because of this bias, the mind tends to reason new beliefs as a confirmation to the test of older beliefs.

• Why?: When mind has adopted an opinion, it draws all things to agree with it.

• Ex.: People believing everything of what they heard from the grapevine.

Framing effect

• What?: Because of this bias, the mind tends to reach different conclusions from the same information depending on how the information is presented to it.

• Why?: The same information can be presented in two ways: One being the positive version and other being negative. And the mind favors the positive presentation more.

• Ex.: In any life-threatening event that has been broadcasted on the news, it could be presented in two way. One being more "lives-saved" centric and the other "lives-taken" centric. And peoples reaction is one which the news has been centred on.

Hyperbolic Discounting

• What?: Because of this bias, the mind tends to choose a smaller reward given sooner over a delayed larger reward.

• Why?: Cognitive biases goes against all common sense and also the mind tends to place a higher value on temporal proximity because it wants to avoid waiting.

• Ex.: Would you prefer to get $50 right now or $100 in a month? If you answered the first option, you know where this is coming from.

This was a micro-list of the many many cognitive biases that have been observed.

So what cognitive biases have you noticed recently from your life? How did you fall prey to it? Let me know in the discussion section below.