Individual Counseling Insights From Westlake Village-Based Patricia McTague-Loft 

It’s no secret that people can get into some rather heated discussions these days. Topics that can really get someone excited range from politics to social issues. Too often, people on each side of an issue end by throwing up their hands as if to say, “How can you be so dimwitted?” Even a charitable person may end up thinking, “Well, they may have good intentions, but boy are they wrong!”

Part of the problem is that many people largely associate with people who hold similar views and get news and information from sources that merely confirm their opinion. In fact, confirmation bias is only one aspect of a larger phenomenon known as cognitive bias. Writing for Very Well Mind, Kendra Cherry says, “The human brain is powerful but subject to limitations. Cognitive biases are often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing. Biases often work as rules of thumb that help you make sense of the world and reach decisions with relative speed.”

To a certain extent everyone has cognitive biases. They may be easier to see in other people, but examining your own biases can actually help you make better decisions for yourself. “When you are making judgments and decisions about the world around you,” Cherry says, “you like to think that you are objective, logical, and capable of taking in and evaluating all the information that is available to you. Unfortunately, these biases sometimes trip us up, leading to poor decisions and bad judgments.”

Since the 1970s, when researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept, other researchers and psychologists have identified many types of cognitive bias, including:

Actor-observer bias: When you try to analyze someone’s motivation, you are the observer — whether you are observing someone else or yourself. Your conclusion about motivation, though, may differ depending on who the actor is — you or the other person. Research has shown that you often attribute the cause of certain actions to internal issues when the actor is the other person — but attribute the cause to external factors when you the actor. A simple example would be a little weight gain. When you put on the extra weight, you might say, “Well I’ve been working overtime and helping our more with the kids and I’ve neglected my exercise and done some stress eating.” When you see another person gain some weight, you say, “Boy, they’re probably lazy and unconcerned about their health.”

Anchoring bias: This is a seemingly benign bias and one few people are aware of, but it’s actually quite powerful. People tend to give greater weight to the first bit of information they are aware of about any given subject. As an economic example, imagine that you hear that the price for a home in certain neighborhood is X. As you begin house shopping in that neighborhood, you perhaps unconsciously compare prices going forward to the price of the first house, regardless of the many other factors that might affect price.

Confirmation bias: Of all the biases many people are aware of, this may be the most commonly known. When someone reinforces an opinion you already have, or some news item reinforces it, you favor that information as valuable and true.

 Functional fixedness: In regard to objects, this tendency is to see an object as having only one use. You might think of this as a simple lack of creative thinking: you see a tool as only being capable of the job it was designed for, when in fact it can be used for a variety of unrelated tasks. Pertaining to people, it leads someone to think of a person in a certain role only being competent in that role. This might lead an unimaginative leader of an organization to not realize an assembly line worker may also have truly creative ideas about the assembly process.

Fortunately, along with research into types of biases, studies have suggested ways to combat your own biases. With cognitive training, a person begins by simply becoming aware of and acknowledging a personal bias. The next step is to consider outside influences that may be affecting your thinking. That in turn should lead to an effort to challenge yourself, trying to objectively gather more information to inform your thinking — whether it confirms your beliefs or not.

For descriptions of a variety of other biases and their causes, see Cherry’s full article here.