What are Cognitive Biases and Their Causes? Learn how It Influences Our Decisions.

People are prone to cognitive biases when making decisions and passing judgements based on the biased information they gather from their surroundings. Everyone falls prey to cognitive biases, for instance, while participating in politics or buying clothes, because they are unfamiliar with cognitive biases and how they influence our decisions. It has been observed that people from ancient times have been caught up in their cognitive biases, even about the earth.

The most evident example is the conflict between Galileo and Roman Catholics. They were reluctant to accept Galileo’s heliocentric idea that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun because they believed that the information they had processed was correct and could not be altered because it had been sourced from holy scriptures.

Their reluctance to accept new ideas that differed from the previous ones was due to their biases towards new information or concepts. That’s why they preferred to stick with their geocentric idea and sentenced him to house arrest until death. That’s how cognitive bias influences even educated people.

Let’s discuss what cognitive bias is and what its causes, types, and examples are.

What is Cognitive Bias?

Cognitive bias is the systematic process of acting irrationally due to our limited ability to process information objectively. It happens unconsciously when people process and interpret data by being influenced by their surroundings and personal biases while making decisions and judgements.

It is not always bad, but it can manipulate our decisions and thoughts about anything or people by blurring our vision of what the facts really are.

Discovery of Cognitive Bias:

Two researchers, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, introduced cognitive bias in 1972. Since then, researchers have discovered different types of cognitive, social, behavioural, business, and other biases, which we will discuss below. But first, let’s dissect cognitive bias and how it affects our everyday lives. It is a psychological phenomenon that helps us navigate information related to our daily lives.

It is difficult for us to think before taking every action, like boarding the train or eating lunch. That’s why we unconsciously perform actions without bothering due to our psychological cognitive bias of being at work all the time. Our brains rely on our experiences and beliefs to push us towards making decisions quickly.

Effects of Cognitive Biases on Our Decisions:

These cognitive biases become mental shortcuts for us (also called heuristics). These rules of thumb help us make judgements and predictions without bothering too much. It is an intuitive process; that’s why people often don’t realise they are acting based on biases or preconceived notions.

What Is the Difference Between Cognitive Biases and Logical Fallacies?

People usually confuse cognitive biases with logical fallacies, but both terms differ. A logical fallacy arises from an error in a rational argument. Cognitive bias is a systematic error associated with our brain, including memory, attention, attribution, and other mental mistakes.

List of Cognitive Biases

There are different types of cognitive biases we encounter in our lives. Let’s discuss some of them and their role in our daily routines.

Availability Bias

If you start hearing the same kind of information about anything, you will unconsciously believe it is accurate or relevant to you. Even though the situation will be different because of availability bias, you try to fit the information you hear into your decisions.

For example, if you hear about several car accidents in a short period, you may believe that driving is more dangerous than it is because those instances are more vivid in your mind. Even though those stats were for driving on highways, and you were supposed to drive on downtown roads.

Bandwagon Effect

Do you remember how we altered our opinions or behaviour about anything in school just because our friends were doing so? That’s because of the bandwagon effect, which drives us to go with the majority, based on the preconceived notion that the majority is always right without critically evaluating it.

Confirmation Bias

People tend to pay attention to views or ideas related to their beliefs or views. The most relevant example is found in the political sphere. We only pay attention to editorial opinions or news headlines that align with our beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing conflicting viewpoints.

Anchoring Bias

Suppose you are out shopping and you see the price tag of a product while casually walking from that store. When you reach your desired store to purchase that product, you unconsciously use the previous price as a standard to compare.

We do this because of anchoring bias in daily life and use initial information to compare with the preceding ones.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Researchers are more likely to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy because of their research bias. Suppose you continually invest time, money, or effort into a project or relationship, even if it is not achieving the desired results. That’s because of the sunk cost fallacy, which is because you invested a lot of time and energy in it.

Stereotyping

We all unconsciously stereotype different things in our lives about any nation, race, or religion. We do so because of our limited information or preconceived notions, beliefs, or assumptions about a group of people while ignoring the diversity and individuality within that group.

Self-Serving Bias

When you succeed at something, you attribute it to your abilities and efforts, but when you fail, you blame external factors or bad luck; you do so because of a self-serving bias. We all do so at different life stages, like conducting a research study.

If our experiments yield the anticipated results, we mark them as the result of our extraordinary abilities. If the results are unexpected, we blame it on bad luck and the supervisor’s lack of guidance. We do so because of self-serving bias.

Halo Effect

Suppose you perceive your mayor as a just man. The halo effect pushes you to perceive that he is physically attractive, intelligent, or kind based on one perception, even without evidence supporting those traits. That’s like building a castle on the sand using one element because of the halo effect.

Overconfidence Bias

Students are more likely to fall prey to overconfidence bias by overestimating their abilities or the accuracy of their judgments. Leading to taking risks by not studying near exams because of an overconfidence bias that I am well prepared due to the overconfidence bias.

Recency Bias

Recency bias occurs when you give more importance to recent information or events while undervaluing older information that could provide a more balanced perspective.

Causes of Cognitive Bias

There are several causes of cognitive bias coming from different sources. But we’ll discuss the important ones here:

Motivation

Our decisions are influenced by our beliefs and behaviour towards anything. We choose the beliefs and views that align with our biases and preconceived notions to reach the conclusions we want to achieve.

Emotion

Most of our relationships are fueled by our emotions towards them, whether hate or love. We tend to make decisions about our loved ones based on our feelings. On the other hand, we critically evaluate everything before making any decisions about strangers.

Limited Information Processing Capacity

Our minds have a limited ability to store and process information about anything. That’s why, when we decide, our minds cannot consider all the relevant information; instead, they are bound to focus on a subset of the available data.

Age

It has been observed that people of older age tend to show less cognitive flexibility. It means we are more likely to fall prey to cognitive bias as we age.

Societal Influence

Societal influence, whether from society or our friends, can influence our opinions. We may unconsciously conform to the views expressed earlier by others or act in socially desirable ways. This can influence collective behaviours, such as voting.

Heuristics, or Mental Shortcuts

Our brain aims not to capture the problem in all its complexity but to arrive at a perfect solution. But it works quickly to arrive at a ‘good enough’ solution to minimise the mental effort.

Examples of Cognitive Biases

If you look around at our daily routine, our lives are full of cognitive biases that we may not even consider. Now that you are familiar with what causes cognitive biases, let’s move on to some real-time examples from everyday life to understand better what cognitive bias is.

Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making 

Apple has used cognitive bias to skyrocket its sales by introducing the iPhone for $600 and then quickly discounting it to $400. Apple deliberately imprinted the price of $600 in consumers’ minds, making them think that $400 was a real bargain. They have used anchoring bias to influence people’s decision-making to buy the iPhone as a worthy device.

Cognitive Bias in Medical

If a patient keeps visiting the hospital regularly and most of the time seeks drugs for quick relief from her illness, then, after some time, her perception will be created as a drug-seeking patient in front of nurses and doctors. However, labels like this can stick to a patient for life and lead to misdiagnosis.

If the same patient visits again with heartache, the doctor may perform a quick physical exam and prescribe painkillers because of the bandwagon effect, which may lead to misdiagnosis.

Cognitive Bias in Real-Life

Suppose a person keeps hearing the news about plane crashes and seeing the heartbreaking images of crashes. In that case, The person may likely believe that travelling by plane is more dangerous than travelling by car due to availability bias.

By regularly seeing plane crash images and hearing about crashes it can make you believe that plane crashes are more frequent than they actually are.

Conclusion

After reading the blog, you will understand what cognitive bias is and how it can affect your decisions. Before making any decision, you should critically evaluate the merits and demerits of doing anything. And try not to get influenced by any kind of bias mentioned above, like anchoring or availability bias, to make the right decisions in life.

As mentioned above, researchers are more likely to become victims of these kinds of cognitive biases for several reasons. So, try to protect yourself from research bias by making the right decisions and showing the appropriate attitude towards your failures.

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