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Mental
Recognizing Bias
Recognizing bias means noticing systematic patterns that pull our judgment away from what the evidence supports.
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The idea
Recognizing bias means noticing when your judgment is being pulled away from what the evidence supports. Psychologists call one important kind a cognitive bias, which is a systematic pattern of departing from rational judgment. People build their own subjective reality from what they perceive, and that personal version of reality, rather than the facts themselves, can guide what they do. As a result, biases can lead to distorted perception, inaccurate judgment and illogical conclusions.
Not all biases are harmful. Some are adaptive, and mental shortcuts called heuristics let people decide quickly when speed matters more than accuracy. Other biases are by-products of the mind's limits, such as its limited capacity to process information. Biases can also lower the evidence people need for claims that fit their beliefs, which can lead them to accept pseudoscience.
To catch bias in your own thinking, you can slow down, ask what evidence would change your mind, and look as hard for facts that challenge your view as for facts that support it. Knowing about biases also matters in practical fields such as medicine, business and finance.
Check yourself
Question 1 of 2
What are heuristics?
Composition
what it's made of
- Systematic error — A bias pushes judgment in the same wrong direction again and again, not at random.
- Subjective reality — The personal version of reality each person builds from what they perceive.
- Heuristics — Mental shortcuts that allow fast decisions when speed matters more than accuracy.
- Processing limits — The mind's limited capacity for information, which produces some biases.
- Self-checking — Slowing down and looking for evidence against your own view.
Connection
how it relates
Under Critical Thinking
Change
how and why it evolves
- Past
- Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the idea of cognitive biases in 1972. Over the last six decades, researchers in cognitive science, social psychology and behavioral economics have built a list of biases that keeps changing.
- Now
- The study of cognitive biases is applied in areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance and management.
- Next
- The list of known biases will likely keep changing as research continues. Tools that prompt people to consider opposing evidence may become more common, though how well they work is still being studied.