9 Cognitive Biases You Didn't Know You Had

You come up with instinctive answers all the time without thinking! Ever wonder where those answers come from?

What autopilot buttons are all those little people in your head pushing?

Here’s 9 ways your subconscious takes over. And, how to make better judgements, decisions and form stronger opinions.

1. Fundamental Attribution Error: You attribute someone else’s actions to their character, while attributing your behaviour to external factors outside your control. Steve cut me off in traffic because he’s an ass, I cut someone off because I’m going to miss the train.

2. Anchoring: You rely too heavily on the first piece of information you receive on a topic. Regardless of the accuracy of that information. It’s 50% it must be a good deal, even if it was priced too high to start.

3. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: This occurs when someone's lack of knowledge in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. Have you ever watched someone on TV and said to yourself, “that didn’t look that hard.”

4. Suggestibility: You’re inclined to accept the suggestions of others. You may fill memory gaps with false information from someone else when recalling past events. Anyone remember Inception?

5. Clustering Illusion: Your brain loves patterns. You often find patterns in random objects or sets of data where no such pattern exists. That cloud looks like a rabbit.

6. Status Quo Bias: This is your preference to maintain your current way of doing things, even if presented with a better option. Switching auto insurance could save you 15% or more, but it’s annoying so you don’t bother.

7. Zero-Risk Bias: You would prefer the complete elimination of risk in one area over alternatives with greater overall risk reduction. This is why people are easily convinced to buy extended warranties.

8. Law of Triviality: People within an organization typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. It’s why your municipality can build bike paths but can’t help homeless people.

9. Survivorship Bias: You concentrate on things that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This leads to poor conclusions because of incomplete data. Only 25% of businesses survive to be 15 years old, but many people associate entrepreneurship with success.

4 Steps For Better Decision Making

1. Awareness: The first step in overcoming cognitive biases is to become aware of them. Got you covered!

2. Evidence-based decision making: Instead of relying solely on intuition, try to base your decisions on objective facts.

3. Seek out diverse perspectives: Biases can be reinforced by surrounding yourself with people who think similarly to you.

4. Slow down: When faced with an important decision, take extra time to evaluate your initial gut feeling. These biases are instinctive, slowing down counters the immediate reaction related to the instinct.

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