Categorizing and Identifying Key Cognitive Biases
We are all biased. Very biased apparently.
Wikipedia lists over 200 biases — social, decision making and memory-related — that we can fall prey to in our day-to-day lives. These sorts of cognitive biases or heuristics are the mental short cuts we take to help us navigate more quickly through the hundreds of thousands of things we think about, decide between and act on every day. Most heuristics serve us well. They get things done for us efficiently and quickly. However, when used in the wrong way or at the wrong time, heuristics can bias us.
One way we can categorize cognitive biases, as first articulated by Buster Benson, and illustrated above is as follows:
1. Too much information — So we make the decision to focus in on specific parts of the information.
2. Not enough meaning — So we fill in the blanks with what we think we know it should be.
3. Need to act fast — So we shoot first and ask questions later.
4. What should we remember — So we control the amount of information entering and remember what we feel seems most important to know for the next time.
Another way of categorizing biases is to look at the type of decision we make and how quickly we stop searching for what we feel is a reasonable solution, as per authors Max Bozeman and Don Moore suggest[1]:
1. Ignorance-based decision making — It doesn’t take a lot of information to make a decision so search until you recognize something and then stop.
2. One-reason decision making — Take a step beyond recognition and recall one important thing that you know and then stop.
3. Elimination decision making — When you have more than two options and one choice, whittle down your categories of choices until you have only one left, pick from that and then stop.
4. Satisficing — When all the choices aren’t immediately available and we have to go looking for options, search until you find a satisfactory solution that will suffice (satisfactory + suffice = satisfice!). This category often happens as a result of limitations — on time or on working memory or perceptual limitations.
Now, here are a few important cognitive biases that commonly afflict all of us:
1. Confirmation bias — The tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information such that it confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs.
2. Fundamental attribution error — Undo emphasis on internal characteristics instead of external factors to explain other people’s behaviours (i.e., what people do truly reflects who they are.).
3. The bias blind spot — The feeling that one is less biased than the average person.
4. The anchoring effect — Relying too heavily on an initial piece of information offered — known as the ‘anchor’ — when making decisions.
5. The representative heuristic — Estimating the likelihood of an event by comparing it to an existing model already in our minds, which we feel represents the most typical or relevant example of that model.
6. Projection bias — The assumption that everyone else’s thinking is the same as one’s own.
Of course, out of more than 200 biases you might ask how I came to these six. Just do a search online and you’ll find that every writer has a different number and make-up of key biases. Well, if you must know, I satisficed because there was way too much information and not enough time. That particular list of six came from an article in The Atlantic by Ben Yagoda. After looking at cognitive biases now for the last few years, I felt it was a satisfactory option that sufficed and so didn’t look any further.
Whether it is 6 or 36 or 200 important biases, I think it is interesting to reflect and realize how as both a learner and as a teacher our thinking, decisions and actions can often be less than optimal. So how does one go about being less biased? How do you make more correct decisions? The key isn’t necessarily about being right or wrong, it’s about optimizing the decision making process. More on that next time.
[1] Decision Making — Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. 7th edition. Max H Bozeman and Don A Moore. John Wiley & Sons. 2009.
