Know your Biases - Part 1

Mark Twain once said "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so".  

Cognitive bias is generally defined as an uncontrollable, systematic error in thinking. It’s hard to see the value of this cognitive circuits as a way of coping with our internal (cognitive) and external (societal, environmental..) pressures. Understanding how this works will allow us to take advantage of the triggers and act quickly, create explanations or meaning, make sense of large amounts of information, and determine what’s important to recall. They are innate, random, and uncontrollable making it part of our nature. If we acknowledge our bias, instead of against it, we can augment and harness the positive things it accomplishes. After all, as humans, we did not only survive, but we thrive in this new era of technology and scientific advancements, even with all of our cognitive imperfections.

In the next few pages you will learn about the ~180 types of bias summarized into four categories, adapted from extensive researches and literature. The biases have been summarized into four main categories of why we have them:

Chapter 1 - Information overload
Chapter 2 - Need for meaning
Chapter 3 - Need to be right / and right now
Chapter 4 - Need to remember (and recall)

In this chapter of "Know your biases", we explore the effect of too much information on our senses.

Enjoy your brain,
Uma Gopaldass
Founder / Principle Advisor
Leading Lotus
Out of the murkiness rises the Lotus - with Clarity


Credits to to Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet by Buster Benson , science journals, academic researches and the list goes on.