The 5 COGNITIVE BIASES You Must Remove to THINK CLEARLY & LOGICALLY…
How to think clearly & more logically by removing these 5 cognitive biases?
We are self-proclaimed greatest thinkers & visionaries of our planet. After all, we have been able to develop language to communicate with each other and build societies & industries by cooperating with our fellow human beings.
Although we like to think that we are rational beings who make decisions based on logic after considering the vast majority of the information available to us and considering different perspectives, it rarely works out that way.
What is cognitive bias?
All of us, over the course of our evolution, have developed cognitive biases that restrict us from thinking clearly & logically. A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking. This is not just an occasional mistake in judgment, but rather a systematic pattern of mistakes. We stumble over these errors over and over, throughout generations and generations.
Why does cognitive bias exist?
Everything is not as bad as it seems. Our brains hate to work hard & like to save energy as much as possible. So it relies on shortcuts, rules of thumb, and other generalities that assist us in thinking on our feet and making “quick decisions”.
Our brain is always trying to simplify the complex surroundings and make our survival in this world a little easier by filtering the bombardment of information through these biases.
Our personal & professional growth depends upon the choices we make in our daily lives and by relying on these biases for our decision-making, we will be pushing ourselves toward being irrational and poor choices.
Here in this article, I’ll be discussing 5 common cognitive biases that hinder our decision-making and how we can avoid them.
1. Confirmation Bias:
This is the mother of all biases, the tendency to interpret new information in a way that fits existing beliefs, theories, and convictions. In other words, we tend to filter out any new information that contradicts our existing beliefs.
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all the new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” — Warren Buffett
The internet and social media especially are reinforcing our beliefs, opinions & convictions by recommending customized content based on our browser history and the posts we’ve previously liked. On the internet, like-minded communities surround us and it becomes even harder for us to find contradictory evidence of our views or beliefs.
Solution:
Murder your darlings; write down your beliefs in terms of worldviews, investments, healthcare, relationships, and career strategies, and set out to find discomforting evidence. Ditching our old beliefs will make us question our identity.
It makes us feel disconnected for a while, but if we are serious about our overall growth in life and form new & better beliefs. We need to let go of our old selves.
2. Sunk Cost Fallacy:
When we have invested a lot of money, time, energy, or love in something. This investment becomes the only reason to carry on, even if we are dealing with a lost cause. The more we invest, the greater the sunk costs are and the greater the urge to continue becomes.
We all fall prey to it. We have all had incidents in our lives where we have carried on just for the sake of the investments that we’ve made, even though we know that there are no future gains attached to those investments.
A toxic relationship, a meaningless project, or a dying stock. This irrational behavior is driven by our need for consistency. We are afraid of losing our credibility. We are afraid to admit that we were wrong. So we carry on with it because carrying on delays the painful realization.
Solution:
- I’ve already spent 10 months on this course.
- I’ve read half of this book already.
- I’ve invested so much money already in this stock.
- We’ve been together for 3 years. I can’t just break up.
If you recognize these thought patterns, then it shows that sunk cost fallacy is at work.
No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of future costs & benefits counts. Don’t try to justify to yourself or to the world that you were right and that your energy or costs will somehow magically be recovered.
3. Self-Serving Bias
We attribute success to ourselves and failures or mistakes to external factors. This is a self-serving bias. Whenever our stock portfolio performs well, we like to give credit to ourselves for how masterfully we have bought the right stocks that bagged profits. On the contrary, if the stock portfolio performs miserably, we tend to blame “The market”
It happens in relationships where each partner believes that are contributing more towards the health of their relationship. This is the tendency for people to protect their ego and self-esteem. They are very particular about how other people perceive them.
Solution:
Do you have friends who can give you the naked truth? If yes, then invite them over or give them a call and ask them about their opinion of you.
If not, then you probably know someone who hates you, give them a call and ask for an honest opinion about your strengths and weaknesses. The truth will sting for a while, but it will help you in understanding yourself better.
4. Social Proof:
The more people who follow a certain idea, the better(truer) we deem the idea to be. We view a behavior as more correct when we see others performing the same behavior in a given setting. Just like any other bias, it is a shortcut we use. In a given environment, we don’t have to figure everything out on our own. We can just follow what everyone else is doing and we’ll be fine.
We can cruise confidently with social proof to take myriad daily decisions. However, it becomes a big problem when we take our major life decisions through the filter of social proof.
Our tendency to assume that an action is more correct if others are doing it is exploited in a variety of settings. “Fastest growing”, or “largest selling” advertisers love to package their products with social proof so they don’t have to convince us to buy them. They know that we’ll buy it because a lot of other people are buying it. It doesn’t matter if we need the product or not.
Solution:
Remember, if 50 million people are saying something foolish, it is still foolish. Be sensitive to environments where our decision is manipulated by providing us with wrong social proof and where the social evidence is deliberately faked to get us to do something we don’t want to do.
5. Liking Bias:
It is ridiculously simple to understand, yet we fall prey to it. The more we like someone, the more inclined we are to buy from them or help them. According to research, we see people as more pleasant if.
- They are physically attractive.
- They are similar in terms of origin, race, personality, or interests.
- They like us or are interested in us.
This is the reason why companies hire good-looking sales staff because they have to interact with the clients regularly. Apart from that, great sales professionals are masters at striking up a conversation and finding common interests, activities, & topics to talk about. We are more likely to buy from them because they have established a connection with us.
We become more vulnerable because, from that point onwards, we stop looking at the merits of the product we were looking to buy.
Solution:
When we get the feeling that we’ve come to like the salesperson or practitioner more quickly or more deeply than we would have expected. Reflect on your interaction. Did the salesperson behave in a way that affects liking?
We might recall that he/she fed us before launching into the pitch and complimented us for almost everything we did or didn’t do. Such as our clothes or our investment choices or anything to establish common ground or likability. Concentrate on the merit of the deal, not the sales personnel.
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