Cognitive Biases - How Your Mind Distorts Reality

I just found this great slideshow through lifehacker.com. It gives a nice visual summary of the main "psychological tendencies that cause the brain to draw incorrect conclusions", split up into...

• the 19 social biases.
• the 8 memory biases.
• the 42 decision-making biases.
• the 36 probability / belief biases.

I especially like the memory bias Cryptomnesia, "a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, or the confusion of true memories with false memories". Scary stuff.

Want to get meta? Consider the Bias Blind Spot, or "the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases". 

So do you really make your own decisions? Really?

Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning

Comments

[Gerard Gomà]

Interesting stuff. It has mede me reflect about how influenced we are by our surroundings. However, at the end of the day this constant contact to influential factors has an effect on our decsion taking because it actually shapes our personality.

To answer your question, I believe that it is not the optimal discussion to talk about cognitive biases when it comes to decision taking. As proven by this slideshow, it's undenyable that our decisions are far from being unbiased. However, what makes a decision our own decision is a deep selfreflection combined with the awareness of this influential factors.

In my opinion, our decisions are based on our opinions and believes which are eventually shaped by a combination of different sources of information (also biased). Therefore, it's not a matter of bias, it's more about how do me make an opinion trully ours by having knowledge of different sources of biased information and selfreflect in order to bring other inputs and choose according to our biased believes.

[Erik Frisk]

So if I understand you correctly, our unique personal biases are what make our decisions our own? Interesting angle. Thought provoking to say the least!

What if you don't want to make biased decisions though? How do you control for cognitive biases if you (per definition) don't know how they are affecting your judgement at any given time?

[Gerard Gomà]

However, the question is: Who is influencing your own decisions, yourself? If so, why don't you want your decisions be influenced by it?
In the end, the word bias has ben looked down on while at the end of the day is a personality shaper.

[Zen]

It is interesting but even more interesting is when you put it into practise.
Everything from mind magic to social engineering are based on this.
It is almost scary how you can actually get people to tell you something and then amaze them by telling them the same thing just moments later.

Or even more scary how there have been rapports about children that have been influenced in such a way that they have created a false memory of something that never happened. There are many interesting rapports about this with sexual abuse towards young children which never happened but due to an outside influence they have created a false memory about the incident.
One particular case I remember were about a woman that had been in contact with a professional child therapist when she were young and what she told the therapist had gotten her father convicted for child abuse and rape. Later when she were grown up she went and did seek help for other problems and through therapy yet again she remembered that those were false memories and that the first therapist had time after time tried to get her to confess that her father had harmed her and after a while, confused and scared, she had taken that as a truth. This is supposedly a huge problem when it comes to children that have witnessed a crime or of children where their parents have been reported for something that might have set the child in danger. Some of the people that are in contact with the child, while having good intentions, influence them in such a strong way that memories are altered or even created.

Even most adults get scared and confused when they have been in a situation that have involved a threat of some sort.
There are evidence in favour of that the faster you get a person that have been in a life or death situation interrogated the more they will tell you without thinking and they are very open to influences from outside. A lot of this have to do with self-preservation and the mind tries to unload the shock of the event by telling someone else about it but thanks to it being shocked and confused it is also a lot easier to influence and change memories of the event.

All in all, it is a very interesting subject. Both with memories and how we make decisions.
And as an illusionist once said "When you come up on stage and stand beside me your decisions are not your own any more. But we love that you think it is."

[Erik Frisk]

Wow, great comment Zen, thank you! These examples certainly show the extremes to which cognitive biases can drive us. Or rather, how others can exploit our cognitive biases to control us in ways we don't even know!