With the sheer amount of sensory information that bombards us at every moment it is not surprising that our brains have evolved to use shortcut to help filter the important information out of the noise. These shortcut serve us well, but the automatic nature of them can present us with challenges when we neglect information or make a decision to act without getting more information.
Cognitive Biases by Drake Baer and Gus Lubin on Business Insider gives a list of automatic ways of thinking that can lead to errors in thought. The list is important, not just because it outlines some of the ways that the human brain can deflect accurate perceptions, but because of their nature, we cannot automatically notice them occurring. This is critical. You can combat them using direct conscious effort, but this will take effort and may never become automatic.
Consider the Conservatism bias, “where people believe prior evidence more than new evidence or information that has emerged,” for a moment. This bias may be active within you right now as you look through the list of the cognitive biases and think that they are false and don’t exist. The fact of the matter is, they are real, and over time your brain may begin to accept them as true and alter your understanding of the world to accommodate for their existence. But for the time being, before your brain assimilates this new information, everything you know about how the brain works says that it is a logical information processing machine that puts the same weight on all information it receives.
Why someone would feel this way makes sense. If we are still alive, everything we did before contributed to our survival. Anything new that we learn may not contribute to our survival so we resist it. Why accept untested information when the consequences can be so dire?
Okay, a few thousand years ago. But given that our brain hasn’t evolved much in the last 20000 years, it is no wonder that these cognitive biases exist. Our brain is the product of an environment that ceased to exist eons ago but is still running the same software with the same intention and now both need to be updated.
Read the list and notice some of the instances in your life were these cognitive biases has played a role in your thinking. You may not commit all of them and are likely very good at preventing some of them from happening. That’s great, it means that we are not powerless to their impact. We can, with conscious effort and practice, become aware of them, observe them happen and reprocess the impacted moment bias free. Taking this moment before acting will make your life better, and much closer to what you want it to be.