Cognitive Biases are human saviour
Table of Contents
- Prelude
- What is cognition?
- What are cognition biases?
- Why it is crucially to detect them?
- Belief, decision-making and behavioral
- Memory
Prelude
The recent observations on human behavior enforced me to make conclusion about their partial self-consciousness as rational creatures. Popular and wide spreading approach to decision making as following one's heart, doing what one wants (able) to do and other peculiar points of view completely displace any reasonable approaches due to their relative complexity and stochastic nature.
Naturally, who would be interesting to mull over a trivial issue for several hours or even days and as result achieve a total failure? It's ridiculous and seems like a silly time wasting.
What is cognition?
Cognition refers to
"the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses"
It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as:
perception
is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. For example, vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.
attention
is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence."
thought
In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. But other mental processes, like considering an idea, memory, or imagination, are also often included. These processes can happen internally independent of the sensory organs, unlike perception.
the formation of knowledge
the construction, transmission, and contestation of forms of knowledge
memory and working memory
judgment and evaluation
reasoning and "computation"
problem solving and decision making
comprehension
production of language
What are cognition biases?
are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment.
OR
are rational deviations from logical thought.
Why it is crucially to detect them?
Belief, decision-making and behavioral
Anchoring bias
The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias whereby an individual's decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or 'anchor'. Once the value of the anchor is set, subsequent arguments, estimates, etc. made by an individual may change from what they would have otherwise been without the anchor. For example, an individual may be more likely to purchase a car if it is placed alongside a more expensive model (the anchor).
The anchoring bias, or focalism, is the tendency to rely too heavily—to "anchor"—on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).
Anchoring bias includes or involves the following:
Common source bias
the tendency to combine or compare research studies from the same source, or from sources that use the same methodologies or data.
Conservatism bias
the tendency to insufficiently revise one's belief when presented with new evidence.
Functional fixedness
a tendency limiting a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
Law of the instrument
an over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Apophenia
is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein), represent as) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as:
"unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness"
He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
Apophenia has also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek patterns in random information, such as can occur while gambling.
The following are types of apophenia:
Clustering illusion
the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).
Illusory correlation
a tendency to inaccurately perceive a relationship between two unrelated events.
Pareidolia
a tendency to perceive a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.