Cognitive Biases

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I'm posting this because I imagine there are at least a few other people here who are into the idea of metacognition. :P

This was an interesting concept I was introduced to a while back - Cognitive Biases.

"A cognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science and social psychology including very basic statistical, social attribution, and memory errors that are common to all human beings."

There's a list of them here. A few of my favorites are...


Egocentric bias --- recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g. remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as being bigger than it was. (My dad is terrible for this!)

System justification — the tendency to defend and bolster the status quo, i.e. existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.

Outgroup homogeneity bias — individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups. (I see this a bit here sometimes.)

Availability heuristic — estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.

Confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.



I catch myself doing a lot of the things on this list.

One thing that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately is how when I conjure up certain memories or retell a story from my life, I tend to angle the story and the people in it toward the topic at hand (in a thread, in a conversation, etc.). Or rather, I tend to angle it toward the feelings that I have about the episode I'm relating to said topic. I noticed this because when I thought of an old friend of mine in answer to a question someone asked me, I recalled an unpleasant story involving this person (note for the paranoid: this was no one from WP) and I related the story as if my overall impression of him were negative .... then later on in answer to a different question, I recalled a positive story about my relationship with the same friend and I related that story as if my overall impression of him were positive. In reality, when I think specifically about this individual (rather than select episodes of the time we spent together), my impression is that he's just a normal guy, more or less.... he did some bad things to me and some nice things, I don't think the bad things were intentional and I just feel mostly neutral, maybe even a bit fond or protective of him.

In summary, when I'm thinking about positive/negative episodes from my life, I catch myself slipping into over-simplification of the people involved in order to support the emotion associated with the memory.

Not sure where that might fit, or if it's even terribly coherent, but there you have it.

The term "cognitive bias" is sort of funny though. It implies that humans were meant to think logically and clearly, and somehow we've gotten bent. Might that not be a sort of bias in and of itself? The bias toward seeing unadorned factual information as the default or "better" way of communicating? In reality it is a very rare human who can achieve such a thing, yet we almost expect it to occur, until we pause for thought.

That made sense.

Hmm. The one you're looking for is probably a fundamental attribution error - "the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior". It seems like you recognize it happening, though.



My inner Mr. Spock is having something of a fit at this paragraph.

I'm a little confused by this sentence, though: "The bias toward seeing unadorned factual information as the default or "better" way of communicating?" Are you saying that some of these tendencies are advantageous in some way?

I think it's the word "unadorned' that I'm specifically confused by. But if I remove it and reread the resulting sentence my inner Mr. Spock starts twitching again.

...ok, I'm done, I promise. I just couldn't help myself, what with all the referencing Spock. >_<

Whoops. I made a psychic reply and didn't actually type it out.

Hmm... that's not quite it. Maybe I can explain it better tomorrow. I was scanning that list and nothing seemed to apply. Perhaps it's not technically a cognitive bias, but simply an observed phenomenon.



I have no stance. It was pure musing. My nature is to say that the "bare facts" style of communication is superior to the more colorful but less accurate modes. However, the level of quality in a given style appears to be a result of the relationship between the style itself and the individual circumstance in which it is employed. A storyteller is expected to entertain and could not do so without any embellishment or stylization, for example. It seems to me that to say that the factual information is superior to the other types is like saying that wheat, water, yeast, and salt are superior to a loaf of freshly baked bread.



I think I might have clarified in the paragraph above. Did I?

That has to be the most boring article I've ever perused. In other words, it takes an "aspie's" narrow/focused interest to find such interesting.

I think so. It's pretty doubtful that the list is comprehensive of all the flaws in thought processes. Humans have a dizzying array of ways to color their perceptions about things. :grin:



I see what you mean about the storyteller situation. I always understood the concept as having mostly to do with embellishing and distorting factual information, though, so I'd never pondered it in relation to creative or entertaining roles. What you're saying make sense, though, especially since so many entertaining stories are embellishments or distortions of actual situations. I know that I'll tell an entertaining lie over a boring truth any day of the week, if my intent is to amuse. :)



Yep.

I'll take that as a compliment. :wink:

Heh. I have that page in my Favorites in my web browser. It was PM'd to me by another Aspie on another AS forum who thought I would share his interest in it. I find it very useful. There's something to be said about being aware of how one thinks.