Cognitive Biases: Why Smart Brains Make Mistakes

Your brain uses mental shortcuts to make fast decisions. Most of the time they help, but they can also lead you to predictable errors. Knowing the common ones is the first step to catching them.

Confirmation bias

• Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour and recall information in a way that supports what you already believe. It is automatic and unintentional, not deliberate dishonesty.
• It shows up in three ways: biased search (looking only for evidence that agrees with you), biased interpretation (holding opposing evidence to a higher standard) and biased memory (remembering the hits and forgetting the misses).
• Psychologist Peter Wason studied this in the 1960s: people testing a number rule mostly tried examples that fitted their guess and rarely tried ones that could prove them wrong.
• Example: if you believe a teacher dislikes you, you notice every short reply and forget the times they praised your work.
• Fix: deliberately search for the best evidence against your view, for example by typing "evidence against..." or "criticism of..." into a search engine.

Anchoring

• Anchoring is being overly influenced by the first number you see, even if it is random.
• In a famous 1974 experiment by Tversky and Kahneman, a wheel rigged to stop at 10 or 65 was spun before people estimated how many African countries were in the United Nations. Those who saw 10 gave a median estimate of 25; those who saw 65 gave 45 (Harvard Program on Negotiation).
• Shops use anchors when they show a high "original price" crossed out next to a sale price.
• In negotiations, the Program on Negotiation advises questioning whether the other side's opening number is relevant at all, and asking how a different starting number would change your judgement.
• Fix: decide your own estimate or budget before you look at anyone else's number.

The availability heuristic

• This is judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind (Simply Psychology).
• Dramatic, recent or heavily reported events feel more common than they are. Plane crashes make headlines; everyday car crashes rarely do.
• Simply Psychology cites research (Sivak and Flannagan, 2003) estimating that driving the same distance is about 65 times riskier than flying.
• In a classic Tversky and Kahneman study, most people thought more English words begin with K than have K as the third letter. The reverse is true: words starting with K are simply easier to recall.
• Fix: when you feel worried or confident about a risk, ask "What do the overall numbers say?" rather than relying on stories you remember.

Other biases worth knowing

• Sunk cost fallacy: continuing with something because of effort, time or money you have already lost and cannot get back (Psychology Today, Dwyer). Example: staying in a course or club you no longer value because you have "already put two years in".
• Dunning-Kruger effect: people with little knowledge of a topic tend to overrate their ability, while experts may underrate theirs (Psychology Today, Dwyer).
• Self-serving bias: crediting yourself for success and blaming outside factors for failure, such as blaming a bad grade on the teacher but crediting a good one to your own effort.
• Hindsight bias: after something happens, it seems obvious ("I should have seen it coming").
• In-group bias: unfairly favouring people from your own group, which matters in multicultural places like the UAE and at international universities.

Living with biases

• Everyone has biases, including experts and very intelligent people. Knowing about them does not make you immune.
• Structures help more than willpower: checklists, writing down predictions before you find out the result, and asking someone who disagrees with you to review your reasoning.
• Arguing the opposite side "for the sake of argument" is one technique suggested for reducing confirmation bias.
• Be kind when you spot a bias in someone else. You are almost certainly showing a different one at the same moment.