8 COGNITIVE BIASES that are CREATING the way YOU EXPERIENCE YOUR LIFE
The good news is that your life is probably different than how you think it is. Unfortunately, that’s the bad news, too. As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says: “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.”
Yet the tools for that construction are not only our experiences, hopes, desires and fears. There are psychological biases that prevent us from seeing an objective reality. In the sense, our collective reality is nothing but a subjective experience vs. subjective experience. The people who do not understand this believe their subjective experience is, in fact, objective. Our inability to coexist is not out of lack of inherent social dysfunction, but simply a lack of understanding of the most fundamental aspects of the bodies we inhabit.
This phenomenon has been studied since ancient Greek philosophy, and it is typically referred to as “naive realism” , the assumption that we see the world as it actually is, and that our impression is an objective, accurate representation of reality. Psychologist David McRaney summarises it as follows;
“The last one hundred years of research suggest that you, and everyone else, still believe in a form of naive realism. You still believe that although your inputs may not be perfect, once you get to thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings are reliable and predictable. We now know that there is no way we can ever know an “objective” reality, and we know we can never know how much of subjective reality is a fabrication, because you never experience anything rather than the output of your mind. Everything that’s has ever happened to you has happened inside your skull.”
So what are these biases that affect us so deeply? Well, for starters, while there are many that are identifiable, there is nothing that says you can’t create your own, unique biases — in fact, it’s likely that most people do. Yet those are likely derived from some combination of the following;
- PROJECTION
Because our sole experience of the world is only through the apertures of our senses and ultimately our psyches, we inevitably project our own preferences and consciousness onto what we see, and interpret it accordingly. In other words: The world is not as it is, it is as we are. We overestimate how typical and normal other people are, based on how “odd” or “different” we feel. We assume that people think the way we do — because our internal narrative and process of the world is all we know.
2. EXTRAPOLATION
Extrapolation is what happens when we take the current moment we are in and then project those circumstances onto our lives as a whole. We make assumptions based on what our circumstances “mean” about us, and then also begin to believe that things will always be the way they are — hence why tragedies feel so insurmountable, yet happiness feels so fleeting ( in fearing that happiness won’t last forever, we lose it — in fearing that grief will last forever, we create it.)
3.ANCHORING
We become too influenced by the first piece of information we hear. For example, our world views tend to be a culmination of or parent’s, not our most inherent beliefs. During a negotiation, the person who first bids an offer creates a “range of possibility”. If you’ve heard of three people getting their books published for about the same amount of compensation, you begin to assume what will be possible for you, simply from your first frame of reference.
4. NEGATIVITY
We can’t stop watching car crashes and pay more attention to bad news and find ourselves completely and absolutely enthralled by the destruction and drama in people’s lives — and it’s not because we’re morbid or completely masochistic. It’s actually because we only have the capacity to be selectively attentive, and we perceive negative news to be more important and profound and therefore what our attention should go to first. Part of the reason for this is an essence of mysteriousness (when we don’t know the purpose of negativity in an existential sense, we become more fascinated by it).
5. CONSERVATISM
The sister of “ANCHORING” conservatism is believing something more only because we believed it first. In other words, it’s an apprehension toward accepting new information, even if that information is more accurate or useful.
6.CLUSTERING ILLUSION
“Clustering” is when you begin to see patterns in random events because you have subconsciously decided. This is what happens when you start seeing the car you want everywhere, or notice everyone wearing red when you’re wearing it. You subconsciously create patterns that, to other people, would be seen as random, simply because you’re seeking a confirmation bias.
7.CONFIRMATION
One of the most commonly known biases, confirmation is what happens when we selectively listen to information that supports or proves our preconceptions of an idea or issue at hand. It’s how we mentally insulate ourselves and our worldview. It’s also how we self validate.
8.CHOICE-SUPPORTIVE
When you consciously “choose” something, you tend to see that thing more positively and actively disregard it’s flaws, more often for a thing you did not actively choose for yourself. This is why the idea that we are autonomous in deciding what’s right for us is so crucial — it dictates how we will relate to that thing forever.
