Cognitive Biases

They are aberrations in the Mind that prevent a person from thinking correctly. These are so universal that one can call them inherent. These have deep roots in evolutionary history of the Mind, and also are caused due to socio-cultural indoctrination. This is often fully automatic and the person is not even aware of his bias. Sometimes even when the presence of a bias is shown, the person refuses to accept it, reason – justification of belief – "I cannot be wrong", aka stupidity.

There are hundreds of biases, and surprisingly (or not!) not many people are aware of them. Many psychological and social studies have been done on them and exotic names are assigned to them. Here is an extensive list of biases if you are interested and unbiased towards reading them: List of cognitive biases.

One need not memorize the list, just knowing that one can have these biases helps to remain uninfluenced by them. However, a small exercise is recommended – read them and see them if you are afflicted by some of them, or most of them. This alone will raise your awareness sufficiently, if you are open minded, it will start a process of cleansing them from your Mind. Awareness is the key. Once you know, you don’t have any excuse to be biased again.

Mentioning here some of the common ones, because we all suffer from them. Here is a short list:

Groupthink

Perhaps the most universal bias, aka herd mentality. One tends to accept something as “truth” simply because everyone else seems to accept it. One needs to decouple the democratic acceptance from actual fact, and the bias goes away. Critical thinking skills are needed to see this – just because someone says its true, does not mean it is so (that is, it does not become your own experience magically). And just because a number of people say so, it does not become a truth somehow. If a large group of people believe in something that is not founded in experience of even one of them, it is just mass stupidity.

Cherry picking

Aka confirmation bias. One tends to pick out the information that supports his existing beliefs, from a pile of available information. Even though the pile may contain a large amount of information that goes against his belief, he ignores it completely and pretends that opposing evidence does not exists. It is a common bias and even intelligent people suffer from it and use it to justify their beliefs or actions. One can get rid of it by intentionally looking for opposing evidence, and open-mindedly accepting it. This will destroy the root belief too.

Framing

People are susceptible to the way an idea is presented. If it is presented in a positive way with lots of positive sounding words, it is automatically believed to be positive (or good). And vice versa. The positive words direct an untrained mind to take the idea as positive too, and suppress any critical thinking that can occur if it is presented neutrally. Advertisers use this bias to sell their often ordinary products effectively. A doctor holding a toothbrush, makes it more acceptable. A pretty model drinking a soup of chemicals (aka cold drinks) makes you go and drink it robotically. Politicians use negative framing to demonize their enemies, making it easy to kill them. So tags like terrorist, enemy of the nation or framed charged are used effectively without evoking public suspicion.

Selective perception

We see what we want to see, or see only that which we believe is true. So if we believe that a person is bad (morally), we selectively see only his bad actions. This often escalates hate for no reason, and causes harm. Another good example is a suspicious person seeing most of the actions of their partner as an attempt to conceal cheating. This often leads to a failure of marriage or a miserable married life. If one believes that a magical ritual is going to get him what he want, he will see events, among random events, that bring him closer to his goal as effectiveness of the ritual, and ignore the events that do not confirm his belief.

False causation

The tendency to assume that if two events happen at the same time or one after the other, one causes the other. The events may be completely unrelated or at most correlated. But correlation is not causation.

Wishful thinking

Twisted interpretation of actual evidence to make it sound like it confirms one's beliefs or preferences.

Halo effect

The spill over of one quality of a person into his other assumed qualities. For example a beautiful person is automatically assumed to be ethical or truthful. A rich person is assumed to be a great person and so on. One good quality does not guarantee goodness in every other area. Food in a clean restaurant may or may not taste good.

Dunning-Kruger effect

An incompetent person has a belief that he is more competent than an experienced and competent person. This happens because an incompetent person is incapable of seeing the difficulty of achieving expertise in something. Not only an incompetent person is so, he is unaware that he is so. This causes the “boss syndrome”, where those who don’t know about a field or subject claim to know the most.

Appeal to authority

The unconscious belief that if a famous or respected person has said something, it must be true. The fact of the matter must be evaluated via direct experimentation that provides a direct experience of the subject, rather than blindly believing some authority. Note that if an authority says something, its chances of being correct go up, but it does not “become” correct. People who manipulate others often use this bias to install beliefs into others by telling them to believe something which was once said by some great man or is written in some old book. People obey, reason – this bias.

Gross Generalizations

This may sound like a bias, it is a bit inherent but more of an acquired belief. It is the tendency to believe that a special case applies to the total class. The class can be people or objects or cultures, anything. It has some evolutionary roots, as it helps in survival. The sight of a tiger killing and eating another man is enough to apply the tag of “dangerous” to all tigerkind. This of course helps a lot, as all tigers are mostly the same. However, this ancient tendency still continues till today when the extent of human experience is vast and diverse. No two persons are same, so the characteristics of one cannot automatically transfer to other just because they can be categorized based on some random criteria, such as nationality or race or language.

Superstitions

There are numerous examples of superstitions. Usually uneducated people suffer from them. But indoctrination or blindly following others results in even educated, sane people getting afflicted by them. We see a lot of superstition in religious people and even the so called spiritual people. The reason is that the religious/spiritual ideas promise a lot of magical stuff, which is nowhere to be seen when it comes to direct experience. And therefore believers in that stuff must rely on blind beliefs to “make them true”.