Cognitive Biases - Background and Outline

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the fathers of modern cognitive psychology. In Kahneman's seminal book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" he outlines several cognitive biases that the vast majority of us are prone to most of the time.

My journey into the realm of cognitive psychology began very recently. A few months ago I started following Scott Adams on Twitter because Trump*, and bought his excellent book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, which I highly recommend. In this book, he outlines things everyone should have in their Talent Stack, and one was the knowledge of cognitive biases. He lists off many in his book, but someone posted on his Twitter about Buster Benson's Cognitive Bias Codex. Long story short, I decided to make one post about each of these cognitive biases (he's quite exhaustive, so we'll see if I actually get through all of them!)

*This post is not an endorsement or censure of either Scott Adams' tweets or Trump. It is, however, an extremely positive endorsement of How to Fail.

I've long been interested in neurobiology, that is, the physiology and anatomy of our brains and subsequent behavior. For some reason, though, that never crossed the (imaginary) boundary into psychology. I've always been interested in philosophy, too. It's long past time I added neurobiology + philosophy = cognitive psychology.

Anyway, enough about my boring backstory, and on to John Manoogian III and Buster Benson's amazing Codex. Here it is in all its miniaturized glory:

You can buy a print version here. I intend to do so as soon as I can afford it. It's a beautiful representation of all 188 cognitive biases so far known to woman (according to Buster Benson and Wikipedia!)

Speaking of, 188 is a big number. So like I said, I really do intend to make a post about each one, but bear with me if it takes a while!

I've been dabbling in this area for a few months now. I wrote a tumblr post about cognitive consonance and cognitive dissonance. I'm currently writing a (very long) piece on intelligence, consilience, and the interconnected nature of knowledge, which I will probably post here on steemit.

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Lots of people have already talked about this before, even on steemit. So what will I bring to the party? Well, I thought I'd talk about the neurophysiological aspect of each bias, in as much detail as I can. Since I'm a biologist, I really want to describe the underlying biological principles of psychology. This will be difficult because the human brain, in all its glory, has not nearly studied itself to completion. And not nearly enough experiments have been performed. But I will try.

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Alright, so, 188 cognitive biases. I'm going to outline the 4 main themes of cognitive biases here in the intro post. Look for the first cognitive bias tomorrow!

According to Buster Benson, the 4 Themes of Cognitive Biases are:

1. Need to act fast
2. Too much information
3. What should we remember?
4. Not enough meaning

Quotes taken from Buster Benson's post:
1 Need to act fast

We’re constrained by time and information, and yet we can’t let that paralyze us. Without the ability to act fast in the face of uncertainty, we surely would have perished as a species long ago. With every piece of new information, we need to do our best to assess our ability to affect the situation, apply it to decisions, simulate the future to predict what might happen next, and otherwise act on our new insight.

2 Too much information

There is just too much information in the world, we have no choice but to filter almost all of it out. Our brain uses a few simple tricks to pick out the bits of information that are most likely going to be useful in some way.

3 What should we remember?

There’s too much information in the universe. We can only afford to keep around the bits that are most likely to prove useful in the future. We need to make constant bets and trade-offs around what we try to remember and what we forget. For example, we prefer generalizations over specifics because they take up less space. When there are lots of irreducible details, we pick out a few standout items to save and discard the rest. What we save here is what is most likely to inform our filters related to problem 1’s information overload, as well as inform what comes to mind during the processes mentioned in problem 2 around filling in incomplete information. It’s all self-reinforcing.

4 Not enough meaning

The world is very confusing, and we end up only seeing a tiny sliver of it, but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world.