20 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Your Decisions

20 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Your Decisions

Remember that everyone, including you and me, suffers from these biases. If you find that you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re special, that somehow these biases don’t apply to you, then you’re only intensifying their influence. Here are a few choice biases that are hidden around every corner:

Availability Heuristic: People overestimate the importance of information that is available to them. A person might argue that smoking is not unhealthy because they know someone who lived to 100 and smoked three packs a day.

Bandwagon Effect: The probability of one person adopting a belief increases based on the number of people who hold that belief. This is a powerful form of groupthink.

Choice-supportive Bias: When you choose something, you tend to feel positive about it, even that choice has flaws. Like how you think your dog is awesome–even if it bites people once in a while.

Clustering Illusion: This is the tendency to see patterns in random events. It is key to various gambling fallacies, like the idea that red is more or less likely to turn up on a roulette table after a string of reds.

Confirmation Bias: We tend to listen only to information that confirms our preconceptions–one of the many reason it’s so hard to have an intelligent conversation about climate change.

Selective Perception: Allowing our expectations to influence how we perceive the world. An experiment involving a football game between students from two universities shows that one team saw the opposing team commit more infractions.

Stereotyping: Expecting a group or person to have certain qualities without having real information about the person. It allows us to quickly identify strangers as friends or enemies, but people tend to overuse and abuse it.