A cognitive bias is a pattern of
deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may
be drawn in an illogical fashion.
There are eight common types of cognitive biases. The first, confirmation bias, is a
tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or
hypotheses. For example, if one
believes that the world is in a hole to deep to climb out of, any information
that confirms this idea will be remembered. A second bias is negativity bias which is the psychological
phenomenon that humans recall unpleasant memories better than positive
memories. For example, remembering
9/11 instead of your friend’s birthday party. A third type of cognitive bias is anchoring which describes
the human tendency to rely too much on the first piece of information when
making decisions. Anchoring causes
people to make future judgments based on their previous anchor of information. For example, at the end of the
nineteenth century, London was covered in horse manure and because of
anchoring, people could not imagine any possible solutions. A fourth bias is hindsight bias which
is the ‘knew-it-all-along’ effect.
This is the idea that after an event occurs it is seen as being more
predictable than before the event occurred. For example, rooting for the underdog in a race and when
that team actually wins claiming you were certain they were going to. A fifth bias is self-serving bias which
when individuals attribute success to internal factors, but attribute failures
to external factors. For example,
applauding yourself for getting an A on your English paper while blaming your C
in Math on a bad teacher. A sixth
bias is belief bias which is the tendency to accept all conclusions that fit in
with one’s system of beliefs, without challenging what one is actually agreeing
with. For example, accepting that
some good ice skaters are not professional hockey players while rejecting the
claim that some professional hockey players are not good ice skaters. A seventh cognitive bias is fundamental
attribution error which is the tendency to overestimate the effect of
personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in explaining social
behavior. For example, when
someone trips you, blaming it on his or her rude personality rather than
believing it was an accident. An eighth
final bias is framing which refers to a set of concepts and theoretical
perspectives on how groups perceive and communicate about reality. For example, answering a survey
question differently based on the wording. Cognitive biases relate to the future of abundance because without
these biases we could accurately assess the probability of future outcomes, but
we do not have “the temporal flexibility nor the neurological capacity to
analyze the data” (Abundance page 29).
Our decisions that we make regarding issues such as poverty and water
scarcity are hampered by these subconscious biases.