An Introduction to Cognitive Bias

When I first learned about Intelligence and IQ, I used to ask people challenging question to see how they use their minds, I used to asked them how they have reached to the answer, and if they had not, how far they did go and how they see the patterns; this gave me the confidence to guess if they could answer a question or not; mostly I was correct about this; once I noticed when I give someone the answer he or she would say "oh I knew it" or "I was just two second thinking away", right away after getting the answer from me. Then I did it another way, I used questions in the same rank of hardness and didn't gave them the answers this time and they confessed that they can't answer such a question.

Actually what happened there and then, is called "Hindsight Bias" and is kind of "cognitive bias". I think all of us had experienced it, but did we notice it? The answer to this question most of the time is "no". Whenever the fact is given to us we see that as a part of ourselves, can't imagine this is granted to us after a while. We think we always knew that earth is round, is it true? This reminds me of a quote of Galileo Galilei that says "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

So what is cognitive bias after all? As the example revealed, something is stopping us from being logical, that is a defensive emotional mechanism, flowing in our feelings. That is a great need in us to feel good or at least not bad about ourselves. Not everyone can be good at everything; of course we are not good at many things. As I want to feel good about myself I learn to stop being objective and also make good statement in my internal speech. It starts in early childhood.

Imagine yourselves without this mechanism you would never would be able of touching a chess piece in fear of comparison because you've been informed some people are chess prodigies. Despite this fact in childhood you activated the mechanism and felt good of winning against your classmate; the same is correct for many of the things you've done. It is absolutely Ok, but then you start being selective about facts, ideas and decisions. You'll interpret them in a way that feels good; it'll make room in your personality.

Some people see the reason behind cognitive bias to be attribution theory, that is in simple, to attribute the positive to yourself and the negative to an outside factor, for instance if you succeed in something you see it as a result of your own performance or the prize of your great job and if you fail you'll attribute it to others or unjust world. In broader sense it's not just about you, but also to other people, the person you like deserve the good and the person you don't like has his or her success due to chance because they don't deserve it!

I believe in correctness of attribution theory but don't see it as the reason for cognitive biases but another cognitive bias with the same hidden rules governing it.

There exist a lot of cognitive biases known and maybe there are some that are not known. Here I write about two other ones.

There is another cognitive bias known as status quo effect. Which I had trouble with before writing this article. You may have noticed what it is from it's name. It is the exact feeling which stops you from making changes. Sometimes you ask yourself what has made it difficult to make decisions, your problem has nothing to do with making decisions but to perform them, and you don't feel ready to change the ongoing situation, you're just trying not to think of that change. I tend to think that the introvert have more trouble with this cognitive bias.

And the last one, the one that I really like, it can be done as an experiment: convince some people that they are intelligent, then ask them if they think intelligence is an important factor in life, their answer in most cases would be "yes", if you otherwise convince them of not being intelligent their answer would be "no". This is known as endowment effect; this is our quality that we see our belonging as valuable and we put more value on things whenever we own them. Some people get obsessed with what they have, a new car can be the core of attention for people that never had one, and you can hear them say completely new sentences like car is a necessity in life.

It is great to be aware of the biases, more great to control them and stop yourself of being illogical.

Seems to be really hard, it is a change; remember the status quo effect. If you want to change first see where you are and define where you want to be, second make a goal oriented plan. If you have decided to do it anyway, then go on, start.