20 cognitive biases that influence your decisions

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Sometimes the brain falls into traps that prevent it from soberly assessing the situation and making the right choice.

1. Anchor effect

People often rate something based on its original value. In a salary negotiation, whoever proposes first sets a series of probabilities in the other person's mind. Sales work on the same principle: you see a thing that used to cost 100 rubles, but now costs 50. It doesn't matter that 50 rubles is an overpriced price, you involuntarily compare it with the original price of 100 rubles. And the greater the difference with the initial cost, the more profitable the purchase seems to us and the more value this product acquires.

2. Availability heuristic

People exaggerate the importance of information coming from themselves. A person can argue that smoking is not harmful by the fact that he knew someone who smoked three packs a day and lived to be 100 years old.

3. Herd effect

The likelihood that a person will accept a belief increases if this belief is supported by a large number of people. This is the power of groupthink. It is because of her that most meetings are not productive.

4. Blind spot effect

Failure to admit that you have cognitive biases is also cognitive biases. People are more likely to notice erroneous behavior and motivations in others than they are in themselves.

5. Distortion of perception of the choice made

We tend to evaluate our choices positively, even if they were wrong. This is similar to the situation where you think your dog is great, even if it bites people every now and then.

6. The illusion of clustering

This is the tendency to see the system in random events, where it actually does not exist. You can notice this misconception if you watch the fans of gambling. For example, when someone is sure that red on the roulette wheel is more or less likely to come out, if before that red fell out several times in a row.

7. Confirmation bias

We tend to listen to the information that confirms our point of view, and not notice the one that refutes it.

8. Conservative thinking

We believe more time-tested statements than new ones. For example, people did not immediately accept the fact that the Earth is round because they did not want to abandon the earlier version of its flat shape.

9. Information distortion

This is the tendency to seek information when it does not affect actions. A lot of information is not always good. By knowing less, people are more likely to make better predictions.

10. The ostrich effect

The decision to ignore dangerous or unpleasant information by burying your head in the sand, like an ostrich. For example, investors are much less likely to check the value of their assets during bad sales.

11. Deviation towards the result

The tendency to judge a decision by the final outcome rather than judging it based on the circumstances of the moment it was made. Just because you won at the casino, you cannot say that the decision to bet all the money was correct.

12. The overconfidence effect

Overconfidence in our abilities leads us to take risks in our daily life. Professionals are more prone to this distortion than non-professionals because they are usually convinced that they are right.

13. Placebo effect

The simple belief that something is affecting you because it has that effect. An example from medicine: fake pills, pacifiers, often have the same effect on people as real ones.

14. Distortion of perception of innovation

When innovators tend to overestimate their usefulness and overlook limitations.

15. Illusion of novelty

The tendency to regard new information as more important than old data. Investors often think that sales will go the way they do today, leading to short-sighted decisions.

16. Salience

The tendency to focus on easily recognizable traits and characteristics of a person or idea. When you think about death, you worry more about the possibility of being eaten by a lion than a car accident, although statistically a second event is more likely.

17. Selective perception

The tendency to allow our expectations to influence how we perceive the world. An experiment during a soccer match between students of two universities showed that each team noticed more violations on the other.

18. Stereotyping

The expectation that a group or person unknown to us has certain qualities. This allows us to quickly identify strangers as friends or foes, but at the same time, we tend to abuse this effect.

19. Survivor's mistake

The error appears due to the fact that we only know the information received from the "survivors", which leads to a one-sided assessment of the situation. For example, we may think that being an entrepreneur is easy because only people who have succeeded publish books about their business, and we know nothing about those who have failed.

20. Zero risk preference

Sociologists have found that reliability is very important to us, even if achieving it is counterproductive. The desire to eliminate all risks leads to the achievement of small results, although one could move towards something larger, but without a predictable outcome.