Cognitive Biases

Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that occur in all people. They occur when we process information from the world around us leading to incorrect conclusions. One of the most common examples is confirmation bias which refers to the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while disregarding or downplaying information that contradicts those beliefs or hypotheses. It can lead people to form inaccurate judgments and gain confidence to make flawed decisions as they may only consider information that supports their existing views and ignore important evidence to the contrary.

Figure 1. Reasons for cognitive biases

Cognitive biases are used in a range of industries to maintain users in a specific behavioural pattern, these industries include:

• Marketing
• Gaming / Gambling

The Objectivity Assumption

The best place to start to learn about biases is The Objectivity Assumption (see presentation above), which is the common held belief that one's self is absent of thought bias. Once understood, you will start to see how the various heuristics, paradoxes or fallacies that make up the human mind exist and are protected by the ego's difficulty in being proven wrong (cognitive dissonance).

Egoic Cognitive Biases

These are cognitive biases which are all based around maintaining the ego's inflated sense of self:

• Self-serving Bias - the tendency to attribute one's successes to internal factors while blaming external factors for one's failures.
• Fundamental attribution error - an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality while attributing their behaviour to external situational factors outside of their control.
• Optimism Bias - the ego doesn't like to think it will fail, therefore you will feel less likely to experience a negative event relative to others.
• Negativity Bias - opposite to the above, and one of the fundamental features of clinical depression. Negativity bias is the psychological phenomenon in which negative information or experiences have a stronger impact on our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors compared to positive ones.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy - the ego does not like to be proven wrong in its past investments. This fallacy occurs when a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
• Loss Aversion Bias - the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.

Social Cognitive Biases

Social pressure exerts pressure on rational decision making to maintain the status quo causing:

• Authority Bias - the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and be more influenced by that opinion. Social pressure can cause individuals to align their beliefs with those of an authority figure, even when those beliefs are incorrect.
• Bandwagon Effect (aka Groupthink or conformity bias) - occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.

Retrospective Cognitive Biases

The egoic mind is so strong it can rewrite past memories in favour of itself:

• Hindsight Bias - the tendency to think that an event was more obvious or predictable than it really was.
• Rosy Retrospection Bias - where even when people have failed they overestimate the good aspects of the past.

Energy Frugal Brain Biases

The brain is the most energy hungry organ in our bodies, so to save energy we have evolved shortcuts in our thinking to reduce cognitive load:

• Availability Heuristic - people tend to use the ease with which they can think of examples when making decisions this is often compounded by the survivorship bias which is our tendency to favour learning from winners.
• Halo Effect - it takes a lot of mental energy to fully assess another person's capabilities so people instinctively look for clues which point them in the general direction. This leads people to assume a person or thing is good in every way because of one good characteristic.
• Status Quo Bias - it is difficult for us to change long held beliefs because of cognitive dissonance.
• Anchoring Effect - the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.

Mathematic Cognitive Biases

A subset of energy frugal brain biases which primarily affect our mathematical and critical analysis skills include :

• Additive Bias - we may be biased toward adding more things—more resources, more rules, more habits and responsibilities—rather than the opposite.
• The Singularity Effect - we care disproportionately about an individual as compared to a group.
• Present Bias - we are hardwired to choose a smaller gain today than a larger gain tomorrow.

Other Cognitive Biases

• Scarcity Effect - makes people more likely to buy something when they think it’s about to run out or be taken away from them.
• Appeal to Pity - someone accused of a crime using a cane or walker to appear more feeble in front of a jury is one example of appeal to pity.

Personal Bias Suppression

Analysing one's beliefs, preferences, or associations while experiencing personal bias suppression can lead to new perspectives that would take years of in depth psychoanalysis. The suppression of this innate tendency often induces the realization that certain aspects of a person's personality, worldview and culture are not reflective of objective truths about reality, but are in fact subjective or even delusional opinions. This realization often leads to or accompanies deep states of insight and critical introspection which can create significant alterations in a person's perspective that last anywhere from days, weeks, months, or even years after the experience itself. Personal bias suppression is one of the hallmark effects of using psychedelics.

Bias Perception Advantage

Once you can see bias in yourself you will start to see bias in others. Artificial intelligence is doing this already by taking advantage of human heuristics to convince us that AI constructed language is in fact coming from a human. This is because human judgments of AI-generated language are handicapped by intuitive but flawed heuristics such as associating first-person pronouns, authentic words, or family topics with humanity. The latest GPT language algorithms know this and are taking advantage of this fact.

References