58 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Everything We Do

We like to think we’re rational human beings. 

In fact, we are prone to hundreds of proven biases that cause us to think and act irrationally, and even thinking we’re rational despite evidence of irrationality in others is known as blind spot bias.

The study of how often human beings do irrational things was enough for psychologists Daniel Kahneman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and it opened the rapidly expanding field of behavioral economics. Similar insights are also reshaping everything from marketing to criminology.

Hoping to clue you — and ourselves — into the biases that frame our decisions, we’ve collected a long list of the most notable ones.

Affect heuristic

The way you feel filters the way you interpret the world. 

Take, for instance, if the words rake, take, and cake flew across a computer screen blinked on a computer screen for 1/30 of a second. 

Which would you recognize? 

If you’re hungry, research suggests that all you see is cake.

Anchoring bias

People are overreliant on the first piece of information they hear. 

In a salary negotiation, for instance, whoever makes the first offer establishes a range of reasonable possibilities in each person’s mind. Any counteroffer will naturally react to or be anchored by that opening offer. 

“Most people come with the very strong belief they should never make an opening offer,” says Leigh Thompson, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “Our research and lots of corroborating research shows that’s completely backwards. The guy or gal who makes a first offer is better off.” 

Confirmation bias

We tend to listen only to the information that confirms our preconceptions — one of the many reasons it’s so hard to have an intelligent conversation about climate change.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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58 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Everything We Do