Understanding Biases in Thinking
More rationale than rational.
We love the left brain school of thought as much as the next person; we weigh our decisions carefully (or so we think)—writing up pros and cons, making spreadsheets and patting ourselves on our deliberative backs. The truth? Decision-making is a lot messier than we’d have ourselves think. That unbiased opinion we pretend to offer: also not a thing. So we put on our thinking caps and looked at some of the top biases that prevent our best thinking.
Implicit bias: a** out of you & me.
Simply put, this refers to attitudes and beliefs that exist outside of our conscious awareness—and everyone has them. At some point in our survival it made sense to parse out friend from foe in a heartbeat’s pace, but today leaning on stereotypes to inform our thoughts and actions does little good. But take heart: We do have the ability to override our brains. We suggest starting with the useful tests at Project Implicit to help make your unconscious way more conscious.
Sunk cost fallacy: good resources after bad.
We’ve all been there—like entrenched toddlers we are loathe to wave the surrender flag on a course of action, a strategy or even something like a stock, even if it’s clear we should, because we’ve already invested too much time and money. This goes hand-in-hand with loss aversion, the preference of risk associated with not losing something versus actually gaining something. It sounds so silly—so what’s the fix? Awareness of course, but also mindfulness in decision-making, and soliciting second, third and fourth opinions from those we trust.
Performance bias: a false sense of confidence.
While this is the deep-rooted (and false) belief that men are better than women at certain tasks, it actually afflicts men and women equally. This may hold women back from throwing their hat in the ring or put men in jobs that don’t necessarily play to their strengths. With it often comes a bad case of attribution bias going around—the tendency to not give credit to women for successes and overly blame them for failures. Again, awareness is key, but it would be wise for all of us to stop and solely deal in objective facts, not hunches.
Confirmation bias: we know what we know.
Israeli psychologist-economist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize by showing how we constantly make decisions based on intuition and biases (our “fast brain”) rather than logic and fact (our “slow brain”). So it stands to reason that much of the time we’re all just in search of new information that confirms our existing thinking. One need only look at our fractured media landscape to understand how it is that we spend hours consuming only the content that aligns with our beliefs. To disrupt it, we need to think like scientists, setting out paradoxically to disprove our thoughts. So we’re challenging ourselves to seek out a few outlets that are ideologically different enough to present all the dimensions of various issues.
Take a deeper dive.
You can color us fascinated with the inner workings of the three-pound enigma between our ears. Some books for further reading:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (along with his new title, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment)
The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath
How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices by Annie Duke
