What are cognitive biases?

Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that affect the decisions and judgements that people make. Some of these biases are related to memory. The way you remember an event may be biased for a number of reasons, and that in turn can lead to biased thinking and decision-making. Other cognitive biases might be due to problems not with memory, but with attention. Since attention is a limited resource, people have to be selective about what they pay attention to in the world around them.

Because of this, subtle biases can creep in and influence the way they see and think about the world. Some cognitive biases include confirmation bias (tending to seek out and believe information that supports one’s existing views while ignoring or discounting conflicting information), anchoring bias (relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions), and availability bias (relying on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision).

Awareness of cognitive biases is important not only to help us improve the quality of our decisions but also to improve the quality of our relationships. For instance, the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to attribute other people’s actions to their character while attributing our own actions to our circumstances—can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts. Understanding biases can help us be more empathetic towards others.

Interestingly, although we tend to assume bias is only negative, there are actually reasons to believe that bias is always present in our thinking and actually may be necessary. To my knowledge the best podcast for thoughtful discussions about bias is NPR’s Hidden Brain. Listen to the episode How Your Beliefs Shape Reality. What do they say about primal world beliefs and belief in a just world? For vocabulary notes and key points to guide your listening click here. For an exploration of how to unlearn our negativity bias see this blog post and video by the psychologist and practising Buddhist Tara Brach.