20 Cognitive Biases That Affect Your Beliefs, Behavior, And Decisions
Believe it or not, we make about 35,000 decisions every single day. Many of those choices don’t seem to require much thought, but there’s a large number of biases affecting our good judgement.
Cognitive biases are ways of thinking that affect beliefs, behavior, and decision-making. Psychologists have identified a long list of these biases. Twenty of the most common ones are detailed in an infographic below, created by Business Insider.
Don’t think you experience cognitive biases? Think again. That’s a bias in itself, called “blind-spot bias,” or when you fail to realize you’re being affected.
Other cognitive biases listed on the infographic include why we ignore dangerous information, why we’re too confident in our abilities, and why we expect situations to be easier than they really are.
Four of the problems that biases help address are when there’s too much information, not enough meaning, a need to act fast, and understanding what we should remember, according to a comprehensive cheat sheet of cognitive biases.
These biases are helpful to understand our own thought processes and they are also often used as marketing techniques.
See also: Psychology Of Decision-Making: Why We Make Choices That Other People Will Approve Of
Psychology Of Phantom Phone Buzzing: Why We Think Our Cell Is Vibrating When It's Not
