“Cognitive bias” is called the psychological effect that causes an alteration in the processing of information, which generates in the person a distortion or irrational interpretation of the perception of reality. It is a psychological predisposition that allows us to reach conclusions quickly, despite lacking any logic. They are also called “cognitive prejudices.”
Why do cognitive biases occur?
We must keep in mind that our brain, responding to a evolutionary and survival need, has been developed to cope with changes and developments. In its complexity, it looks for shortcuts to better adapt to the world. To achieve this, in urgent situations it has been much more effective for humans to act quickly and make decisions quickly than to wait to use reason and analysis.
Without a doubt, cognitive biases can be useful in some cases, but this lack of rationality can also lead us to big mistakes.
What do they obey?
They are produced from certain processes that have to do with:
- Heuristic processing (mental shortcuts)
- Motivations of an emotional and moral nature
- The social influence
10 of the most studied cognitive biases
Through different research, numerous cognitive biases have been discovered. These are 10 of those that Cognitive Psychology has studied the most:
- Correspondence bias: or attribution error. It is the tendency to overattribute internal aspects of personality over external ones when trying to explain the actions of others, but judge ourselves by the situation.
- Hindsight bias: Through this bias we perceive past events as more predictable than they were.
- Confirmation bias: we are prone to find or remember information that reinforces our position and confirms our previous perceptions or hypotheses.
- Self-interest bias: We tend to perceive our failures as circumstantial, but we consider that our successes are due to our merit.
- Ingroup favoritism bias: or ingroup bias. Members of a group have a tendency to value members of their own group positively. However, they do not have a positive perception of outgroup members.
- Groupthink: We want to maintain group harmony and this leads us to make irrational decisions to prevent conflict from arising.
- halo effect: If we identify a positive trait in a person, we tend to extrapolate it to all of his or her facets. The same is true when it comes to negative traits.
- False consensus effect: It happens when we think that there are more people who agree with our opinion than there really are. Most think their own worldview and way of life is more widespread than it really is. Related to confirmation bias we’ve seen before.
- Forer effect: Also called personal validation fallacy or Barnum effect. It is the tendency to feel identified by general or vague personality descriptions with which, in general, anyone can identify. Very common in fields such as astrology, divination, graphology…
- Drag effect: This is the name given to the tendency to join trends or fads, to do or believe in something because many more people do it.