We ALL suffer from cognitive bias. These are natural and necessary for day-to-day living in fact. But if we are unaware of them, especially when processing new information, we run the very high risk of distorting reality. Read up on each of these, challenge yourself to be conscious of them and challenge them regularly.
Confronting Cognitive Bias is something I work with professionally. I’ve given talks about it, and so have done a fair bit of research and reading. I am not an expert, but feel confident to speak about it and point others to appropriate resources and research.
I made a comment above that it’s “necessary for daily life”. And I want to expand on this. Biases are important shortcuts to decision making. Without shortcuts, we’d spend forever at the store deciding which loaf of bread to buy. So we use various biases to make the decision simpler.
Unfortunately, we can’t just turn them off easily when we need to process more important information. So we must intentionally challenge those biases.
We know from research that people that are informed and process information by intentionally acknowledging and confronting cognitive bias make objectively better decisions.
A word of caution: identifying cognitive bias in the arguments and positions of others can be useful but it’s FAR MORE useful to confront your internal cognitive bias. The attached list isn’t intended to be a bat with which to bludgeon the others to your way of thinking by calling them out. Instead, it’s a guide to improving our OWN critical thinking and decision making.
(image credit: Unknown, found on reddit.com )
