![]() The term cognitive bias was first coined in the 1970s by Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who used this phrase to describe people’s flawed patterns of thinking in response to judgment and decision problems (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). As such, these errors tend to arise from problems related to thinking: memory, attention, and other mental mistakes.Ĭognitive biases can be beneficial because they do not require much mental effort and can allow you to make decisions relatively quickly, but like conscious biases, unconscious biases can also take the form of harmful prejudice that serves to hurt an individual or a group.Īnd although it may feel like there has been a recent rise of unconscious bias, especially in the context of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, this is not a new phenomenon. Therefore, we often rely on mental shortcuts (called heuristics) to help make sense of the world with relative speed. Still, we can only process about 40 bits of information per second (Orzan et al., 2012). On the other hand, unconscious bias, or cognitive bias, represents a set of unintentional biases - you are unaware of your attitudes and behaviors resulting from them (Lang, 2019).Ĭognitive bias is often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing - we receive roughly 11 million bits of information per second. ![]() However, these biases can often be dangerous when they take the form of conscious stereotyping. Conscious bias, or explicit bias, is intentional - you are aware of your attitudes and the behaviors that result from them (Lang, 2019).Įxplicit bias can be good because it helps provide you with a sense of identity and can lead you to make good decisions (for example, being biased towards healthy foods). In psychology, there are two main branches of biases: conscious and unconscious. Biases are natural - they are a product of human nature - and they don’t simply exist in a vacuum or in our minds - they affect the way we make decisions and act. Cognitive biases can be caused by many different things, such as heuristics (mental shortcuts), social pressures, and emotions.īroadly speaking, bias is a tendency to lean in favor of or against a person, group, idea, or thing, usually in a way that is unfair. But before we dive into these different biases, let’s backtrack a bit first and define what bias even is.Ī cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments.īiases are unconscious and automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. These are just a few of the many instances of cognitive bias that we experience every day of our lives. Or have you ever found yourself only reading news stories that further support your own opinion? ![]() ![]() Have you ever shouted, “I knew that was going to happen!” after your favorite baseball team gave up a huge lead in the ninth inning and lost? Have you ever been so busy talking on the phone that you don’t notice the light has turned green and it is your turn to cross the street?
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