Cognitive biases: what they are, types and how they work – Online Psychologists

The the way we perceive reality and what happens in our environment plays a fundamental role in the way we behave and act.

The cognitive biases They are a clear example of how our thoughts take unexpected paths. Sometimes, they even cause us to flee from rationality. distort reality.

Cognitive biases are psychological predispositions that lead us to reach certain conclusions automatically.

They are also known as cognitive biases and cause a alteration in information processing captured by our senses. This generates erroneous judgments, incoherent interpretations or a distortion of reality, as we have already discussed.

But why do cognitive biases exist if they are completely irrational?

He human brain has not evolved so that we can use reason constantly, but so that Let us be able to surviveFor this reason, it is often more useful and effective. act quickly even if we are not right, we should not react until we are sure that what we have come up with is reasonable.

The truth is that thanks to cognitive biases we are able to make quick decisions, without the need to resort to rationality.

The phenomenon of cognitive biases arises from the prevailing need for human beings to be able to make snap judgments when faced with certain problems or situations that would be impossible to process due to their complexity.

Although cognitive biases can lead us to mistakes, in certain situations They allow us to decide quickly and make decisions intuitively.

But, When did people start talking about cognitive biases?

It was in the year 1972 when Daniel Kahneman He realized the difficulty many people have in reasoning intuitively with large dimensions.

Following this discovery and over the years, Kahneman along with other researchers, were proving the existence from a series of scenarios in which the decisions were not based as foreseeable according to the theory of rationality.

Below we explain Several examples of cognitive biases that have been discovered through research in psychology and cognitive sciences:

This cognitive bias is one of the most affecting to human behavior. It is based on giving more importance to the possibility of losing something than to the possibility of gaining something of the same value.

That is to say, the The idea of ​​losing something has more importance for the human being, the idea of ​​winning, even when both options have the same probability of occurring and suppose that something with the same value is added or subtracted.

We refer to the tendency to feel identified with a series of ambiguous descriptions that actually fit the personality and way of being of any person.

This cognitive bias refers to the tendency we have to prioritize and prefer reduce a small risk instead of eliminating those risks that are most likely to occur.

It consists of the tendency to positively value the characteristics and actions of those people that we have rated positively in other occasions.

This happens, for example, with beauty.

It is based on the tendency to assume that others are more vulnerable to the cognitive biases that we have.

The truth is that We cannot completely eliminate the biases of our lives, since these are there due to the way our brain works.

Although we must emphasize that it has been shown that being informed about the existence of these cognitive biases and being aware of how they manifest, can become a little more immune them.