Identifying and Defeating Cognitive Bias

Sometimes the mistakes we make have nothing to do with our choices, those things that we do knowingly and with intent. Often, the reason we make bad choices or questionable decisions is due to deeply held, systematic errors in thinking called Cognitive Bias. 

What is Cognitive Bias?

At their core, a cognitive bias is a type of mental short-hand that helps you process the myriad of things you take in every day. 

Sometimes these are related to Memory, as the way you remember an event may be biased for a number of reasons, leading to biased thinking when a similar situation arises in the future. 

Other times this can be an issue of Attention, one of the most limited resources we have at our disposal. The need to specifically pay attention to things we deem important can lead to subtle biases in how you think that influence the way you think about the world and act in response to it.

You could accurately think of them as a rule of thumb that lets you make sense of the world and speed up decision making. Without them, you would spend a lot more time thinking about every little thing, rather than acting. The problem is we humans aren’t as logical and objective as we think, which means our biases can lead us down the path of poor decisions and bad judgments if we’re not careful.

Causes and Types of Cognitive Bias

Even the simplest choices would be made incredibly time-consuming if you had to think about every single possible option. The world is complex and there is so much information available at all times, so it becomes necessary to create and rely on mental shortcuts. These shortcuts are often incredibly useful, such as using your own preference for foods or activities in order to quickly plan meals and activities (positive decisions). On the other side of the coin, this tendency can also cause us to act in a negatively biased manner that actually makes our decisions worse. 

There are several ways these biases surface, with mental shortcuts (“heuristics”) being one of the major causes. Other causes can include social pressures, individual motivations, emotions, and limits on your ability to process information. All of these are contributing factors and they don’t always lead to bad biases, as many serve as a way to adapt to our environment. This is especially useful in dangerous situations - such as assuming a moving shadow in a dark alley is a mugger, leading you to exit the alley to safety.

Other biases, however, aren’t as benign in their actions. Here are some of the most common types.

Confirmation Bias favors evidence that supports your view while actively discounting evidence that contradicts your view. Often causes us to ignore anything less than overwhelming evidence if it contradicts our current beliefs/opinions - and sometimes we’ll even ignore that!

Availability Heuristics place greater value on information that is more readily available in your own brain, giving greater power/authority to that information in the process. Often causes us to overestimate the likelihood of something similar happening in the future.

The Halo Effect is when the overall impression you have of a person influences how you think and feel about their character (and that of their actions). Things like physical attractiveness can cause us to rate a person as smarter, more interesting, or more skillful than they actually are.

Self-Serving Bias is where we blame external forces for bad things and congratulate yourself for good things. This can lead us to be constantly scapegoating others for our own failures (“My book flopped because the industry is stacked against me!”) rather than take responsibility for the decisions we made that led to those failures (“My book flopped because I did nothing to promote it.”).

Attentional Bias is the tendency to pay attention to some things while ignoring others. When making decisions, this can lead us to place more emphasis on certain aspects of a given option even when those aspects are less important. For instance, when buying a care you might focus much more on look/comfort and ignore the safety record/gas mileage.

Actor-Observer Bias is very similar to the self-serving bias, but it reverses the equation. It tends to attribute our own actions/deficiencies to external causes that are out of our control (“my cholesterol is high because of genetics”) while simultaneously attributing other people’s actions/deficiencies to internal causes (“you are overweight because you don’t eat right or exercise”).

Functional Fixedness is when we see objects as working in one particular way. This causes us to ignore other ways an object might used “off label” such as using a large wrench to pound in a nail when you lack access to a hammer. At its worst, this bias can extend to people, leading us to assume that a person’s skills/abilities are limited based on their role (e.g. failing to recognize that an Administrative Assistant also has leadership skills).

Anchoring Bias is where we rely too heavily on the first piece of information we learn. For instance, if you learn that a price is average, then anything lower seems like a deal while anything higher seems like a rip-off. If you’re aware of it, you can actually use this bias to your benefit by being the first one to “put information on the table” and better control a conversation or negotiation.

The Misinformation Effect is when information gained after the event interferes with the memory of the event, often changing how you remember something based on what you hear afterwards. The most obvious issue is with eye-witness testimony in court cases, since it is incredibly easy to impact (or even change) someone’s memory of an event by peppering them with new (sometimes false) information afterwards.

The False Consensus Effect is our tendency to overestimate how much other people agree with our own opinions/beliefs. Also called the “I am the World” effect, it can lead us to assume we are part of a major majority when we are actually a minority.

Optimism Bias leads us to believe that we are more likely to be successful and less likely to suffer misfortune as compared to our peers. A common effect of this is in risk taking behaviors that, in other people, we would see as irresponsible but in ourselves we see as reasonable.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is where people believe themselves to be smarter and more capable than they actually are. This often takes the form of being unable to recognize their own incompetencies and, thus, they cannot take steps to correct them.

How do you Defeat Cognitive Bias?

The first step towards addressing your own bias is to recognize that it both exists and impacts your judgment on a regular basis. As a human being, this is basically unavoidable. As we’ve covered earlier, the fact that we develop cognitive bias isn’t, in itself, a bad thing. It’s when those biases have a negative impact on our lives that they become problematic. 

Once you recognize that you have biases in general, you need to start paying more attention to where specific biases crop up for you. Each type of cognitive bias also has an associated method of defeating it.

Confirmation Bias: apply the same skepticism to your own beliefs and evidence as you do those of others. Don’t assume that evidence supporting you is right and evidence against you is wrong without going into additional effort to verify things.

Availability Heuristics: spend more time thinking about a plan or issue, letting your mind wander through the various aspects of a problem. This way you can dig deeper than the surface, knee-jerk reaction your brain has to presented information. Said another way, don’t be hasty.

The Halo Effect: look beyond a person’s immediately obvious good qualities such as physical attractiveness, charm, or the trappings of success. Spend time delving into their decisions, attitudes, and how they treat others before you ascribe them a positive image.

Self-Serving Bias: no one wants to be the cause of their own failure, but the most often cause of our failures is...our own actions and decisions. When you find yourself blaming a situation, person, or other external force for your failures, stop and think critically about what you could have done differently to change things. At the same time, when you manage to find success, spend time thinking about the external forces that helped you along.

Attentional Bias: when making a decision, put in the effort to look beyond the few things that catch your attention up front. Delve deep into what separates Option A from Option B and compare them in every meaningful way you can reasonably do in the time you have available.

Actor-Observer Bias: since this is basically the reversal of the self-serving bias, you can use the same strategy to address it. When you are considering the source of your own failures, spend time specifically considering the decisions you could have made differently that would have caused a better outcome.

Functional Fixedness: try to catch yourself grouping or labeling objects and, especially, people into categories based on their “functions”. While it’s true that most things have a purpose in their design, that doesn’t mean they can’t be adapted for something else. Especially in the workplace, this also applies to people. Just because someone is employed in a specific role, that doesn’t mean their skillset and “usefulness” is limited to that role.

Anchoring Bias: research, research, research! The best way to fight the anchoring bias is to realize that it’s happening and seek a larger pool of data from which to make you decision. If something is presented as the “average” in a situation (e.g. price) then spend time researching other options to find the true average.

Misinformation Effect: this one is very hard to deal with, because we don’t always have control over what we experience in the future related to events in the past. The best way to address this is to keep a written, audio, or video journal record of important events. Make these entries as soon after the event as possible, and before speaking with anyone else about it.

The False Consensus Effect: much like the anchoring bias, this one is defeated by research. We hold a great many opinions, and many of those will be shared by small, large, or majority groups of other people. The only way to know is to seek out evidence of both those who agree and those who disagree with you. For instance, you might feel like everyone hates brussel sprouts because you do. On the internet you find a message board called “Brussel Sprouts are the Worst” with 50,000 members. If you stop there, you’ll think that those 50k people prove your opinion is the majority. However, another bit of research might then turn up a second message board titled ‘Brussel Sprouts are Totally Delicious” with 600,000 members! According to the evidence, your opinion is not the majority, so you cannot assume it is.

Optimism Bias: look, we all want to believe that good things will happen to us and that bad things are, somehow, confined to happening to others. The truth is, both good and bad things happen to everyone. When making decisions, spend time thinking critically about what could go wrong as well as what could go right. Try to give yourself the kind of advice you would give to a friend in the same situation.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: just like we want to believe that failure isn’t our fault and that good things are more likely to happen to us than to others, we also want to believe that we’re smarter than we are. I do it. You do it. Everyone does it. The trick is to spend time objectively reviewing your own strengths and weaknesses with an eye towards improving them. If you find it difficult to do this for yourself, then have someone who you trust to be honest with you help things along. Once you know where you can improve, you can spend the time to do so.

Closing Thoughts

Cognitive Biases can be both beneficial and problematic, depending on the context in which they are used. I hope this article helped you identify some of your own and make a plan to move past them. While we cannot eliminate them in total - and we shouldn’t since they have a lot of adaptive benefits, besides - we can learn to identify the negative biases and address them head-on.

Need help finding and overcoming your biases? Breakout Kaizen Coaching can help you systematically find and eliminate the biases that are holding you back. Click here to get started today!