Self-serving bias: A tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. Overconfidence in positive outcomes is often the result of optimism bias. For example, instead of seeing the world for what it is, you overestimate your chances of succeeding at something. Optimism bias: A tendency to be over-optimistic, and to underestimate the probability of undesirable outcomes. Confirmation bias is often what drives people to accept even the most absurd conspiracy theories: they only examine information that confirms the theory, not any information that disconfirms it. For example, you seek information that validates your current liberal point of view by watching CNN, CNBC, and reading the New York Times, and you discount news from sources like Fox and the Wall Street Journal. Here are some of the cognitive biases we all have:Ĭonfirmation bias: A tendency to filter information in a way that confirms what you already think. For most of us today, quick life-and-death decisions are rare, yet we retain these biases as part of our evolutionary inheritance. Moreover, in the environment in which our prehistoric ancestors lived, making every decision in a slow, thoughtful manner could be deadly!Ĭognitive biases evolved as a way of speeding up information processing, and gave our ancestors the ability to act decisively in life and death situations. We make so many decisions during the day that it would be taxing on our brains to make every decision in a slow, thoughtful manner. The human brain is limited in its capacity to process information. Cognitive biases are examples of fast thinking.Ĭognitive biases evolved as a way of saving time and energy while at the same time promoting survival. They distinguished two cognitive mechanisms for decision-making: fast thinking, which uses mental shortcuts, and slow thinking, which uses reasoning. The concept of cognitive bias was first introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts (called heuristics) that fill in gaps in our information and help us act decisively despite those gaps. By analogy, craving sugar is a tendency to act, whereas eating too much ice cream is an actual action.īefore going into this, let’s first understand what cognitive biases and fallacies are. The difference between cognitive biases and fallacies is this: cognitive biases are tendencies to act, whereas fallacies are actual actions. In addition, they can trigger errors in reasoning-fallacies. Those dispositions include cognitive biases, and those biases can make us feel certain even when we’re wrong. We humans have inherited many dispositions from our evolutionary past.

I had felt certain about my solution to this problem, but feeling certain doesn’t guarantee that your assessment is accurate. His reasoning was that the search crew would have some idea of the plane’s last location by tracking the black box and smoke from the wreckage. He explained that staying close to the plane was by far the best option for survival. There was an expert in the room: a former US Air Force pilot. I made my case to our group, and they ended up siding with me. I felt certain that everyone should go look for food and help. This question was posed to me in a seminar. Half of the group leaves the crash site to look for food and help, while the other half stays put.Everyone leaves the crash site to look for food and help.Suppose your plane crashed in the middle of nowhere with you and a dozen other survivors.

Optimism bias examples