I am posting an article written by Brianna Wiest. I think it is spot.
8
Cognitive Biases That Are Creating The Way You Experience Your Life
BY
BRIANNA WIEST
The good news is that
your life is probably different than how you think it is. Unfortunately, that’s the bad news too. As
Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says: “The confidence people have in
their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence
of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”
Yet the tools for that construction are not
only our experiences, hopes, desires and fears. There are psychological biases
that prevent us from seeing an objective reality. In a sense, our collective
reality is nothing but subjective experience vs. subjective experience. The
people who do not understand this believe their subjective experience is, in
fact, objective. Our inability to coexist is not out of lack or inherent
social dysfunction, but simply a lack of understanding of the most
fundamental aspects of the bodies we inhabit.
This phenomena has been studied since ancient
Greek philosophy, and it’s typically referred to as “naïve realism,” the
assumption that we see the world as it actually is, and that our
impression is an objective, accurate representation of reality. Psychologist
David McRaney summarizes it as follows:
The last one hundred
years of research suggest that you, and everyone else, still believe in a form
of naïve realism. You still believe that although your inputs may not be
perfect, once you get to thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings are
reliable and predictable. We now know that there is no way you can ever know an
“objective” reality, and we know that you can never know how much of subjective
reality is a fabrication, because you never experience anything other than the
output of your mind. Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside
your skull.
So what are these biases that affect us so
deeply? Well, for starters, while there are many that are identifiable,
there’s nothing that says you can’t create your own, unique biases – and in
fact, it’s likely that most people do. Yet, those are likely derived from some
combination of the following.
1.
Projection
Because our sole experience of the world is
only through the apertures of our senses and ultimately, our psyches, we
inevitably project our own preferences and consciousness onto what we see, and
interpret it accordingly. In other words: the world is not as it is, it is as
we are. We overestimate how typical and normal other people are, based on how
“odd” or “different” we feel. We assume that people think the way we do –
because our internal narrative and process of the world is all we know.
2.
Extrapolation
Extrapolation is what happens when we take the
current moment we are in, and then project those circumstances onto our lives
as a whole. We make assumptions based on what our current circumstances “mean”
about us, and then also begin to believe that things will always be the way
they are – hence why tragedies feel so insurmountable, yet happiness feels so
fleeting (in fearing that happiness won’t last forever, we lose it – in fearing
that grief will last forever, we create it).
3.
Anchoring
We become too influenced by the first piece of
information we hear. For example, our world views tend to be the culmination of
our parents’, not our most inherent beliefs. During a negotiation, the person
who first puts an offer out creates a “range of possibility.” If you’ve heard
of three people getting their books published for about the same amount of
compensation, you begin to assume what will be possible for you, simply from
your first frame of reference.
4.
Negativity
We can’t stop watching car crashes and
pay more attention to bad news and find ourselves absolutely enthralled by the
destruction and drama in people’s lives – and it’s not because we’re morbid or
completely masochistic. It’s actually because we only have the capacity to be
selectively attentive, and we perceive negative news to be more important and
profound, therefore, what our attention should go to first. Part of the reason
for this is an essence of mysteriousness (when we don’t know the purpose
of negativity in an existential sense, we become fascinated by
it).
5.
Conservatism
The sister of “anchoring,” conservatism is
believing something more only because we believed it first. In other words,
it’s an apprehension toward accepting new information, even if that information
is more accurate or useful.
6.
Clustering illusion
“Clustering” is when you begin to see patterns
in random events because you have subconsciously decided to. This is what
happens when you start seeing the car you want everywhere, or notice everyone
wearing red when you’re wearing it. You subconsciously create patterns that, to
other people, would be seen as random, simply because you’re seeking a
confirmation bias.
7.
Confirmation
One of the most commonly known biases,
confirmation is what happens when we selectively listen to information that
supports or proves our preconceptions of an idea or issue at hand. It’s how we
mentally insulate ourselves and our world-view. It’s also how we self-validate.
8.
Choice-supportive
When you consciously “choose” something, you
tend to see that thing more positively, and actively disregard it’s flaws, more
often than you would of a thing you did not choose for yourself. This is why
the idea that we are autonomous in deciding what’s right for us is so crucial –
it dictates how we’ll relate to that thing forever.
To learn more about this subject, please free free to contact me at coachbillconley@gmail.com
Sound advice for life (Motivation coach and speaker, Entrepreneur, Life Coach, Author, Father)
Twitter: billconley7
Please go to billconley.net and take the free personal values assessment. It only takes a few minutes and at the end of the assessment you will be emailed a 15 page report that I am sure will be enlightening to you,.
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