Understanding Your Six Most High-Risk Mental Biases
Our marvelous 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Stone, allowed Dona and me to launch an experiment I’d read about in my Mom’s Ladies Home Journal. The results initiated me into the mystery of brains. We know our minds can play tricks. However, its only recently that cognitive biases – and how they sabotage our decisions - have been systematically studied.
As our class settled into their desks one morning, Dona marched in loaded with books. I followed close behind. Dona approached Mrs. Stone’s desk, then loudly and purposefully dropped her stack. She spun around and falsely charged me with pushing her. The class erupted. After a couple minutes, Mrs. Stone asked the class, what happened? What did you see? To my astonishment, most of the class had seen me knock Dona’s books. Just as the Ladies Home Journal had predicted.
Unconscious biases influence decisions on what we buy, what we click on, what we eat, and who we vote for. On one hand, cognitive biases provide a benefit. No matter how hard we prepare, human thinking is subject to insufficient knowledge and processing capability. We live in a messy and often unpredictable world. Humans evolved mental habits to make fast choices under ambiguous conditions. But these “rules of thumb” can also hijack rationality and destroy self-control.
The U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) determined that six mental biases are the most damaging.
1. Bias blind spot: Recognizing biases in other peoples’ thinking but failing to see them in ourselves. You feel you are less biased than the average person. (Everyone reading this list will undoubtably experience this bias right now!)
2. Confirmation Bias: Looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Paying attention and giving more credence to information that supports us while discounting or rejecting information that oppose. Even after Dona admitted the ruse and Mrs. Stone and I explained the situation, several students refused to believe that I hadn’t pushed Dona.
3. Fundamental Attribution Bias: Explaining the behavior of others by giving too much credit to their personality (“No wonder he fell, he’s reckless”) while discounting the role of circumstances (“He fell because the ladder was broken.”)
4. Anchoring Effect: What you have just heard, seen, or experienced has a strong effect on your subsequent judgment or choices. In one experiment, participants were told that decaffeinated coffee was actually regular. Most experienced an increase in heart rate after drinking.
5. Representative Heuristic: Estimating that the likelihood something will happen, or how someone will behave, based on an existing prototype already in our brain. An investor may assume that a company is a good investment because they personally like the product.
6. Projection Bias: Behaving as though your future feelings are going to be similar to how you feel today. People with full stomachs underestimate how tempting a bag of chips will be tonight. Assuming that others think or feel the way you do - especially risky in this time of social media echo chambers.
Two Nobel prizes have been awarded for discoveries in the field of behavioral economics – to Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith in 2002 (Kahneman’s classic book Thinking Fast and Slow is a detailed, and fascinating, must-read on this subject) and Richard Thaler in 2017. Understanding how biases work helps people make healthier decisions and achieve better outcomes for themselves, their families and communities.
You can’t eliminate your biases, but you can learn to work with them. Recommendations for managing your biases include:
Hold your opinions and ideologies more lightly: Make room for doubt in even your most fervently held beliefs. The presence of our biases guarantee that we will always be a little bit – and sometimes a lot - wrong.
Take a breath: Be particularly wary of ideas from media or friends that evoke emotion. If you catch yourself saying “I knew it!!”, “OMG!” or “Ooh, I want that!”, you’ve been hooked. Count to ten and consider your biases before responding, sharing, or making a decision.
Build your resilience muscles: Biological systems are natural, but vulnerable. We can be crushed by a truck, so we avoid running in front of them. Educate yourself about your biases, your role in perpetuating them, and how others use them to influence you (intentionally or accidently). Become an activist in promoting truth, transparency, and ethics.
It was a little painful for my 6th-grade self to be blamed for a transgression that all parties admitted was a trick. By the end of recess, our psychological theater had faded for my classmates. But I never thought about human minds in the same way again.