BIASES: AN OVERVIEW

What are biases?

A bias is a disproportionate favouring or disfavouring of a particular idea, person, or group. This is usually in a prejudicial or even unfair manner. Biases can be conscious or unconscious (explicit or implicit, respectively). This article is concerned with cognitive biases: a systematic error in thinking that affects how we process information, make decisions, and form judgments.

Most of our biases happen in the subconscious mind, they’re triggered by the way we process information and they’re often quite useful. The average person reportedly makes around 35,000 decisions every day, most of them (around 30,000) are micro-decisions. Micro-decisions are non-important actions that occur daily, these are things like shifting your posture, averting your gaze or a certain colour scheme catching your eye. Up to 3,000 are operational, or habitual decisions: Things like phrasing a sentence or checking your phone. And around 200 decisions are conscious, these are the ones you think about, such as what to wear, planning your route around road closures and train delays.

Our subconscious mind is responsible, in some way for all of them. Our conscious mind will make the conscious decisions, but the processing that has already been completed by the subconscious plays a huge role.

Why do we have them?

Biases serve an important function, if you had to consciously make all 35,000 of your decisions, you’d never get anything else done. It would be time consuming, and tiring – you’d get decision fatigue. Biases, in this case, serve as shortcuts. You’ve made most of these decisions before, so often that they become second nature. Your brain wants you to expend as little effort as possible and so it bypasses the consciousness and makes these rapid-fire decisions in a way that feels like it is without your input.

I’ve heard it phrased before as your conscious mind spends a lot of it’s time justifying and taking credit for the actions of your subconscious.

What are the types of cognitive bias?

The cognitive bias codex was put together by John Manoogian III and Buster Benson (linked here), it categorised approximately 180 different cognitive biases, breaking them down into four distinct categories:

• Information overload: when there is too much information to process, so your brain takes shortcuts and filters it.

• Lack of meaning: where the information is there but it isn’t complete or doesn’t mean anything without context, so your brain subconsciously fills in some of the gaps.

• Need to act fast: self-explanatorily, where you don’t have time to make a well-informed decision or there are some external pressures on you, so your choice is made with an inability to perform due diligence.

• Memory limits: we alter the information stored in our brains. We change details based on how the memories were experienced. This can impact our decision making and thought processes and fundamentally change what we think we know.

Each of these categories is then broken down into a collection of biases that fall within them.

What are some important biases?

There are thousands of different types of biases that we come across, all of which are important. But a few of the more common ones I have gone into detail on below.

The codex is a great tool to visualise where these biases fall, but it is also important to note they don’t fit neatly into one category. Biases inherently have a lot of overlap and nuance to how they work and might fit under two or more of the categories.

Information overload

Availability heuristic: this is a mental shortcut. It relies on the immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a specific topic or concept. The general rule your brain uses for this is that “if I can think of an example quickly, it must be important”. This is exactly why when something is all over the news, you assume it is a huge problem, whereas things that maybe should be more concerning to you, that you know of, you aren’t actually too concerned about; they aren’t being broadcast on mainstream media constantly so don’t have your attention.

Von Restorff effect: also known as the isolation effect. This tells us that when multiple bits of information are presented to you, if one differs from all the others, that is the one you will remember.

Negativity bias: a well-researched effect, humans are predisposed to weigh the negative more strongly than the positive. There is a well-known experiment that demonstrates this: if I were to ask you to flip a coin with me and I call it right, you must give me £10. However, if you win, I have to give you £10. Most people will say no to these odds. That is true if I were to also say I’d give you £12, and you would still only have to give me £10. It’s even true if I double my bet to £20 for many people. The bet is objectively in your favour and generally you still won’t take it. This is a type of negativity bias called loss aversion. Click here for a video on this by Veritasium

Lack of meaning

The Gamblers Fallacy: this is the belief that with two or more independent and equally probably outcomes, one is likely to happen next more so than the others based on what has happened before. People do this in roulette all the time, five blacks, followed by five reds, followed by five more blacks then suddenly six reds in a row come. Black is obviously next, right? It’s due because you noticed a pattern and the pattern was broken so logically it must be about to return to the pattern. But that is fundamentally wrong, and has cost a lot of people a lot of money. This isn’t just true for gambling; it works for any independent events.

Stereotype: probably the most well-known of all biases, it’s a word in our daily vocabularies. Stereotypes are generalised beliefs about specific categories of people. Stereotyping can be about anything from personality traits to ability. As with any bias, it can be beneficial as it helps to streamline decisions based on previously stored information rather than new information flow. However, certain stereotypes are often seen as harmful or regressive, which they can be in certain circumstances as they inhibit us from acknowledging changes of time.

The bandwagon effect: another one you will generally see often, where people in certain groups will change their behaviours and beliefs to match those of the collective. It can be extreme, like within gangs and terrorism groups, or it can be more subtle. For example, people in a certain profession might change the language they use or the clothes they wear to “fit in” better with those around them.

Need to act fast

The Dunning-Kruger effect: this is another common one. When somebody has a low-level ability in something they tend to overstate and overestimate their competency. You will generally find that if you simultaneously map out somebody’s perceived ability versus their actual competency level, there will be a spike early on where they mismatch. The diagram is simplified and it does impact people at all levels, but it does show that the novice period is the most susceptible.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Simplified

Escalation of commitment: an individual group may choose to keep investing in a project or an action beyond the point where they know it is incorrect or unlikely to succeed. It often occurs when investment has been made into the project already. The next commitment they must make is only slightly more than the last commitment they had to make. Subjectively, it feels justifiable. It is generally seen as irrational, or an inability to let go. This is very closely linked to the sunken cost fallacy and explains why people often don’t cut their losses.

The rhyme-as-reason effect: one of the more whimsical biases. This is where sayings or statements are seen as more accurate and trustworthy when they rhyme. Quite useful in the marketing context, this is likely one of the reasons old wives tales stuck for so long. For example, experiments have shown that people tend to agree with the phrase “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals” more so than the synonymous “What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks”. This is somewhat also linked to the idea of a Keats heuristic where people will often judge a statement’s truth by its aesthetic qualities.

Memory limits

Cryptomnesia: a type of bias where a person, although not intentionally plagiarising, comes up with an idea that they believe is their own but is in fact something they heard of previously and have forgotten that they knew about.

The Google effect: or digital amnesia is where we often forget information we known can be found again with relative ease. This (and some element of muscle memory) is why, thirty years ago, people remembered phone numbers that were important to them, but now many people only know their own. There is no longer a requirement to hold onto that information.

The primacy effect: generally, when you read a long report, email, or news article, you remember the beginning and the end much better than the middle. The end, probably because it is most recent to you and you’ve had less time to forget, but the beginning because of the primacy effect. This occurs because it is the primary piece of information we have on a topic; therefore, we hold onto it.

Final points

The layering of biases is also hugely important; you’ll never only be affected by one at a time. In isolation you might be working to avoid their impacts. You might be making a decision where you have some recently available anecdote in your mind that guides it. You could have remembered that specifically because it was weird or stood out to you at the time. That is an example of availability bias and the Von Restorff effect working in conjunction; unconscious biases layering together to solidify your conscious choice.

We can’t avoid bias, it’s inevitable and it’s important, but we must be aware of it, and we must do our best to counter it when it displays itself in the wrong context. Bias awareness and structured analytical techniques are the two best ways to ensure your work and thought processes are as unbiased as possible.

They impact everyone from the top of the chain to the bottom. It is not only important to know how those biases impact you, but it is incredibly important to think about their impact on others. You can even use some of these biases during your communication. Things like the primacy bias is one of the reasons why we should lead and end briefs with the key takeaways.  The negativity bias is why we always tell people the negative consequences of working against our advice. Biases, whether we acknowledge them are not, shape our internal and external worlds.