A systematic error of thinking or rationality in judgment that influence our perception of the world and our decision-making ability.
Takeaways
- Rather than thinking through every situation, we conserve mental energy by developing rules of thumb to make decisions which are based on past experiences. These mental shortcuts increase our efficiency by enabling us to make quick decisions without the need to thoroughly analyze a situation but can also influence our decision-making processes and judgement without our awareness.
- Understanding of our own intrinsic biases may not eliminate them completely from our decision-making but it increases the chance that we can identify them in ourselves and others and serve as a safeguard against fallacious reasoning, unintentional discrimination or costly mistakes our decisions.
- Take for example our tendency to seek out, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preconceived notions and ideas. This is known as confirmation bias, and it can make having a logical discussion about a polarizing hot-button issue with someone incredibly difficult.
Origins
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the notion of cognitive biases in 1972 after they observed people’s inability to reason intuitively with greater orders of magnitude. In a series of replicable experiments, Tversky, Kahneman, and their colleagues demonstrated that human judgment and decision-making differ from rational choice theory. They explained human differences in judgment and decision-making in terms of heuristics, which are mental shortcuts that provide quick estimates about the probabilities of uncertain events. but can introduce severe and systematic errors.