4 Cognitive Biases Holding You Back

Your Biases Are Limiting Your True Potential

It’s time to learn how to identify your cognitive biases so that you can see beyond them.

Rather than applying critical thinking and logical reasoning to important decisions as you should, your biases take the easiest and shortest path to what it thinks must be true. This happens when your mind applies a combination of biases designed to create shortcuts to judgments to help make faster decisions while using fewer mental resources.

Biases exist to make processing information faster and easier. By design, they also make our thinking lazier and dumber.

These shortcuts are not only wrong most of the time, they can be downright dangerous. Chauvinism, egocentrism, misogyny, nationalism, and ethnocentrism are just a few examples of the ugly biases responsible for creating the blind spots in many people’s baseless choices which can create dangerous stereotypes and prejudices. Not to mention inflict great harm on a society plagued with such limiting “thinking.”

Identifying your own biases requires self-awareness and emotional intelligence. That same awareness and intelligence is required to see beyond your biases and empowers you to change your mind and evolve.

Growing up, my family was predominantly loyal to one political party. When I was old enough to vote for the first time, I didn’t question who I’d be voting for. I didn’t even think about it. <insert red flag here> As I became more aware of the world around me and more evolved as a person, I realized how different my views were from the politician I voted for and what that person perpetuated and stood for. Looking back, I had ignored all of the warning signs of the potential failures of their term before I exercised my right to vote.

How did I make that choice so easily and mindlessly? Biases. I see now that I voted for the automatic default choice of those around me, instead of executing a carefully thought out, future-facing, intentional, and intelligent decision. How did that happen? I allowed my biases and the biases of those around me to influence my decision rather than exercise a few moments of critical thinking and logical reasoning. This time around, I know better and will do better.

It is a gift to yourself and the world when you learn to push yourself to see beyond your default thinking. To see and think beyond our defaults, we must acknowledge their existence and learn to become aware of what is happening when our thoughts lazily go there.

To evolve as individuals and as a nation we must learn to identify and see beyond the cognitive biases that hold us back. Here are a few of the common cognitive biases we should all be aware of:

Confirmation Bias: This occurs when you warp data to fit or support your existing beliefs or expectations. It essentially causes you to only accept information that you already believe to be true as the truth. When this bias is at play, changing your mind based on new facts no matter how serious or convincing is nearly impossible. In other words, anything that may challenge what you think you know to be true will not even be entertained as truth. The effects of this bias are prevalent in religion and politics and is potentially the most limiting of all biases.

I witnessed an example of this only days ago when someone in my own family tried to brag to me about a 30%+ increase in economic growth in the 3rd quarter while completely disregarding that it followed an all-time record low 30%+ contraction in the previous quarter. While it might have been convenient to his cause to repeat the first figure, it was intentionally misleading to repeat one number without the other which he didn’t even know.

Why does it matter?

Because an inability to look outside of your existing belief systems will vastly limit your ability to grow and improve, both as an individual and ultimately as a society. We all need to consider more possibilities and be more open to alternatives to grow and progress. Facts are facts. You can’t pick and choose which ones are most convenient to believe while disregarding others. You are smarter than that.

Availability Cascade: This popular bias happens when something false is repeated so many times that you actually start to believe it. Just because you hear something frequently does not make it true, though this bias tends to make the brain believe otherwise.

What are some examples of repetitious falsehoods?

• US economy was recently at an all-time high — Growth in the gross domestic product between 2016–2020 term was at its worst since Hoover was president and other metrics such as wages and business investment ranged from decent to mediocre.
• Bats aren’t blind — They see quite well and also have amazing hearing.
• You don’t use 10 percent of your brain — You actually use 100 percent (when you’re not being controlled by your biases.)

Surprised? Bad information seems to spread as fast, if not faster than the truth, making it crucial to fact-check frequently before making decisions based on potentially bad information. If you notice something coming up, again and again, dig into the facts and determine for yourself what is or isn’t true. We’re talking to you weird uncle on Facebook who shares baseless conspiracy theories.

Bandwagon Effect: This is when you think things must be true just because a lot of other people think it. In many ways, humans behave like herd animals, blindly accepting whatever they encounter as long as there seems to be some social proof.

Is it true if a lot of people seem to think it is?

The great Mark Twain summed this bias up best with his saying: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” It’s important not to allow the beliefs of others to sway you without careful thought and research on your part. Don’t accept things at face value.

Dunning-Kruger Effect: This bias causes people with low ability at a task to overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.

Why does it matter?

Simply put, the people who know the least are often the loudest. In a world where everyone has a voice through social media and not enough people fact check what they hear or read, many Americans are allowing uninformed voices to actually make them less informed by providing them with an audience. When combined with the biases described above, the Dunning-Kruger effect has the potential to lead an entire demographic off the edge of a cliff.

Are the biases mentioned above influencing your choices more than the critical thinking necessary to make smarter decisions? If so, it might be time to practice some self-awareness to seek out the blind spots keeping you from making better choices.