A few years ago I read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which got me hooked on learning about behavioral economics and psychology – something I wish I had studied in college.
One of the most fascinating parts of the book was reading about the biases of human intuition. Kahneman suggests that when we become aware of our biases, we can work to become better thinkers (and better people overall).
How do you define a cognitive bias?
They are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. A mistake in reasoning, evaluating, remembering, or other cognitive processes, often occurring as a result of holding onto one’s preferences and beliefs regardless of contrary information.
Cognitive biases are confirmed by replicable research, however, there is often disagreement about how to classify them. Regardless of classification, they’re extremely interesting to study – many demonstrate harmful behavior chains, while others can actually be explained by more useful behaviors. It’s only through exploring the biases one by one that we can figure out how to understand and correct our
Which leads to my new project. I’m going to be spending time researching each of the cognitive biases and writing about the ones I find most interesting. With over 100 cognitive biases listed on Wikipedia, I’ll have lots to choose from.
I’m going to breakdown the biases into three categories:
- Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases
- Social biases
- Memory errors and biases
Stay tuned!