Understanding Our Cognitive Biases is an Essential 21st Century Skill
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Psychiatrist Carl Jung
We do not see reality as it is
Whether we are navigating this world using emotions, logic, or contexts, we tend to operate with the underlying assumption that we perceive the world accurately enough, that although our access of reality is limited, we can generally trust what we see, hear, feel, analyze, judge, etc. But is it really the case? Do we see reality as it is? Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman does not think so ▶️: “We do not see reality as it is. We’re shaped with tricks and hacks that keep us alive… [Like a desktop computer,] evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Space and time as you perceive them right now are your desktop. Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop” [11:43].
Neuroscientist Anil Seth elaborates on ▶️ this distortion of reality: “…our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, are kinds of controlled hallucinations… in which the brain’s predictions are being reined in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality… So our experiences of the world around us and ourselves within it, they’re kinds of controlled hallucinations that have been shaped over millions of years evolution to keep us alive in worlds full of danger and opportunity” [2:18].
To start understanding this controlled hallucination we call reality, let’s look at our perception — information we receive from our sensory organs in order to represent and understand our environment, for example colors for vision, laughter for hearing, flowers for smell, sweet for taste, and soft for touch… How realistic are our senses in representing reality?
Sights
Sight is the sense the majority of us most rely on. If internet controversies like blue/gold dress or pink/grey sneaker have taught us anything, it is that we can’t rely on what we see. Search the term “optical illusion” and you’ll get countless examples of the fallibility of our eyes. “Seeing is not believing. Our senses deceive us,” the writers of Cosmos episode 4🎞️ declares, and goes on to break it to us that many of the stars we see in the sky are actually ghosts from the past — otherworldly suns that were burning bright up to millions of years ago, whose light might well have gone extinguished by the time it has travelled to our optical sensory organs. Also the straight horizon we see where land and sea meet? It’s actually curved because the Earth is round (sorry flat-earthers). It only looks flat because you don’t have a high enough vantage point at ground-level to see the curvature of our Earth. This brings us to the first cognitive bias: mind projection fallacy — “an informal fallacy that the way one sees the world reflects the way the world really is”. But if it is not reality that we see, then what are we actually perceiving? For one: what we want to see. As diarist Anaïs Nin said: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” So it is not seeing that is believing, but believing that is seeing.
Hearing
Another internet sensation “Yanny or Laurel” alert us about the potential fallacies of our auditory system. But that’s hardly the only faults in our hearing. Our ears “ring” phantom noises in quiet places. The McGurk Effect ▶️ shows what we see alters what we hear, and vice versa. The Tricktone Paradox ▶️ demonstrates that if a tone contains a high and a low note at the same time, our brain would pick the tone we prefer to hear and ignoring the other. The Shepard Tone Illusion ▶️ makes a repeating sound clip sound like it’s rising endlessly (and yes, those annoying clubbing songs take advantage of this auditory illusion to manufacture a cheap sense of “getting high”).
Smell
Compared to sight and hearing, we rely much less on the good old olfaction. Knowing from experience that we don’t have an excellent sense of smell, we usually supplement smell with sight, taste or other evidence (e.g., expiry date on a package) to confirm a smell. Still we can be easily fooled: think about the supermarket OJ made without real OJ (it smells close enough though). Perhaps this lesson can be borrowed to our other senses and assumptions: double check to make sure.
Taste
From cola to wine blind tasting, we are forced to reckon with our tongue’s familiarity bias, color bias, geographic origin bias, and price bias. In fact, we ourselves do tricks to fool our taste buds, like adding salt to watermelon to make it taste sweeter. As in smell, our gustatory system appears to rely a lot on context, and its unreliability stems from making wrong assumptions based on context, such as deeming that familiar-looking cola is tastier or wine made in France must be superior. (For more about context, refer to Self > Principles > Context Matters & Things Change and anchoring effects).
Touch
Few of us presumably have high confidence in our sense of touch. As the show Fear Factor demonstrated over and over, we don’t generally trust the touch of what we can’t see. Information we receive from our nervous system can deceive in many ways. The security blanket or stuffed animal we held as a child gave us a sense of security, real or not. Phantom pain haunt people long after the physical pain stops. Victims of severe hypothermia feel “hot flashes”, burning sensations that play a cruel joke on their reality of freezing to death.
Self-movement and body position
Our proprioception can of course also go wrong, for instance when we experience vertigo or motion-sickness — feeling of movement when we are still.
All these potential errors of the senses call to question our perception of reality. In naïve realism or direct realism, people make the erroneous assumption that “the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are”. Representative or indirect realism, on the other hand, reminds us that “we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is”. Plato gave us a disturbing image for representative realism in his Allegory of the Cave ▶️:
“Imagine this: People live under the earth in a cavelike dwelling. Stretching a long way up toward the daylight is its entrance, toward which the entire cave is gathered. The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck. Thus they stay in the same place so that there is only one thing for them to look that: whatever they encounter in front of their faces. But because they are shackled, they are unable to turn their heads around…
Some light, of course, is allowed them, namely from a fire that casts its glow toward them from behind them, being above and at some distance. Between the fire and those who are shackled [i.e., behind their backs] there runs a walkway at a certain height. Imagine that a low wall has been built the length of the walkway, like the low curtain that puppeteers put up, over which they show their puppets…
So now imagine that all along this low wall people are carrying all sorts of things that reach up higher than the wall: statues and other carvings made of stone or wood and many other artifacts that people have made… From the beginning people like this have never managed, whether on their own or with the help by others, to see anything besides the shadows that are [continually] projected on the wall opposite them by the glow of the fire…
And what do they see of the things that are being carried along [behind them]? Do they not see simply these [namely the shadows]?…
Now if they were able to say something about what they saw and to talk it over, do you not think that they would regard that which they saw on the wall as beings? And now what if this prison also had an echo reverberating off the wall in front of them [the one that they always and only look at]?…
Whenever one of the people walking behind those in chains (and carrying the things) would make a sound, do you think the prisoners would imagine that the speaker were anyone other than the shadow passing in front of them?” (Source)
Sure, this allegory was Plato’s commentary on how social construct imprisons the masses’ understanding of their lives, but isn’t it also a brilliantly visceral allegory of how our sensory system dictates our perception of reality?
As Allegory of the Cave demonstrates, how we perceive our situations does not end with our sensory inputs. We need to interpret what we receive from our sensors as well. As CrashCourse explains: “Sensation is the bottom-up process by which our senses, like vision, hearing and smell, receive and relay outside stimuli. Perception, on the other hand, is the top-down way our brains organize and interpret that information and put it into context” [00:59].
Although both cognition and perception can go wrong, cognitive biases are not developed solely from error. Instead, they are born out of necessity. The human brain can process 11 million bits of information every second, but our conscious mind can only handle about 120 bits of data per second. To speed up mental processing, our brains constantly take cognitive shortcuts called heuristics to help us make faster decisions in complex situations in our mind-boggling world. In our time of emotion-manipulating social media, radicalization of public opinions, misinformation and disinformation, and breakdown of intersectional and international discourse, being realistic and humble about our cognitive biases not only can help us make better judgment and decisions, but also prepare us for life actualization, group collaboration, and problem-solving in the global scale.
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