Introduction
We all employ two systems of thinking. One is methodical, based on logic and conscious. It’s also relatively slow, but more often than not, better at making the right decisions. It’s based on learned behaviour and serves us well.
Our other system is quicker; it’s older (in evolutionary terms) and, sadly, prone to errors, or biases.
There is a lot more to this, and if you want more of the background, Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow‘ is a great read.
It’s enough to know, for this site, that we’re dealing with issues caused mainly by our quicker but ultimately more error prone thinking system.
What is a cognitive bias?
There are several ways to look at this, but ultimately, pulling the elements apart, there is cognition (essentially meaning ‘thinking’) and bias, defined as inclination or prejudice for or against something or someone.
To me that would pretty much nail it, but with the critical addition of the concept of this being unconscious.
Wikipedia defines it as: “a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.”
The premise is that as Individuals, we create our own “subjective reality” from our perception of sensory inputs. Our own construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate our behaviour in the world.
Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
Every watched someone’s behaviour and though “Why on earth are they acting like that?” They are processing the same information as you but their filters and biases (they’re point of view, based on experience and learned behaviour) simply results in a different manifestation; a behaviour that you don’t recognise.
This all sounds really negative though, right? Well, partly.
Although it may seem like such misperceptions would be aberrations, biases can help humans find commonalities and shortcuts to assist in the navigation of common situations in life. Essentially, we need to be able to act more quickly than our conscious thoughts. If, 1000s of years ago, you saw a predator shaped outline and thought “hmm, I wonder if that is actually a predator or…” you did not finish that thought and subsequently exited the gene pool.
Put simply, we do not have the mental capacity to consciously think about every scenario and deep dive into every sensory input, we must cede some thinking to the autopilot, the subconscious.
As Daniel Kahneman explains, we have two cognitive processes; a quick, instinctive one and a slower, more methodical one and we need to be aware of when we are experiencing each one.
So, although it seems like cognitive biases are ‘faulty thinking’, in a way, the processes that lead to them are the reason we are still here and did not exit the gene pool as a result of a predator.
The key is to understand what cognitive biases are and make the way we challenge them a conscious process, when we need to.
What is a heuristic?
Heuristics are mental ‘shortcuts’ which we adopt, usually based on experience and convention that get us to a fast, satisfactory conclusion, but not necessarily as ideally, as possible.
Think of heuristics as ‘rules of thumb’, used to reduce the amount of thinking we need to do, to speed up decision making. We use them to get a ‘best guess’ answer, quickly.
We use many of these heuristics when estimating facts and figures and especially when we’re asked to estimate probability, which most of us are really quite poor at.
From the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, we’ve established that there are three main types of heuristic we employ.
