Prejudices, fears, the life experience of older generations, superstitions and other factors we've already looked at above together form cognitive bias in a person. We'll also touch on this theme in the chapter on thinking, where we'll talk in more detail about intuition.
Cognitive biases are nothing other than thought patterns in which the brain goes wrong by relying on intuition (System 1) instead of handing the matter over to reflection (System 2). If you didn't understand any of that, that's completely normal — more detail will come in a later chapter. But cognitive biases are something negative for our productivity and planning in general (we can set wrong goals and carry them out inefficiently), so I needed a point on this in "Slowing factors".
Cognitive biases can arise both in daily life and at work. They can show up in many areas and topics: family, society, when planning something or even just when communicating. In other words, such biases can appear anywhere that requires at least some involvement of thought or any reaction from our brain. When we give this or that answer to a question, we may not even notice how we — or rather our intuition — give a wrong answer for ourselves.
Where do cognitive biases come from and when do they appear? Most often in these situations:
1) Difficulty understanding the world. To my mind this is the most common problem for anyone in the humanities. It's easier and faster to complete the picture in your head using data you already have than to analyse new inputs. So the brain fills the missing pieces of the knowledge puzzle with stereotypes and data from past experience. Add to that the fact that most people think in religious and astrological terms rather than Darwin's theory, evolution and the laws of physics — the laws by which, like clockwork, internal combustion engines, microwaves, phones, radio, GPS and everything else they use every day actually work. These are laws that model and predict the structure and composition of the universe well. (If that weren't so, our current unshakable laws would be wrong and things like those engines or radio simply wouldn't work.)
2) Information overload. When there's too much, our brain takes in only what it understands and filters out the rest.
3) Need to react quickly. This pushes us straight to conclusions, skipping analysis. This also includes making decisions in stressful situations — and we have more than enough of those in life.
4) Choosing what to remember. The amount of information the brain can hold per unit of time is limited, so we remember generalizations and a few vivid details and ignore the rest.
We're unlikely to get rid of cognitive biases completely. But when we produce any thought or answer we should keep catching ourselves with the question: "Is this a fact?" or "Is this my thought?" If it's a thought, it should ideally be checked further. Cognitive biases are a very broad topic that could fill a whole book. And I'm not a specialist in this area, so I can't write more than I have. What matters is that we've raised the topic, you know about it, and if you're interested you can look for more online or read a book.
