Examples Of Cognitive Bias

Our judgement is affected by cognitive biases, “a cognitive bias refers to systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgement, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion” (Wikipedia, 2016). In simpler terms cognitive biases are natural ways our brains work that causes distortions or errors in thought or judgement. There are multiple types of cognitive biases, three examples I have experienced are confirmation bias, representativeness heuristic, and the availability heuristic. In each of these examples of cognitive bias, my brain has made errors in thought or judgement. My first example is with confirmation bias, which “is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities” (Wikipedia, 2016). This definition basically means remembering evidence that confirms your beliefs, while ignoring evidence to the
In other words, its basing decisions on the information that is the most vivid, or comes to the mind the easiest. I love horror movies and a million different movies have a scene where a murder takes place in the shower. When I take showers and close my eyes I always think about being stabbed through the curtain. Even though it is highly unlikely that I would be stabbed in my shower my brain will still think it is going to happen, making me less likely to close my eyes when in the shower. This represents the availability heuristic, because I am basing the decision to close my eyes in the shower on the information that is in horror movies (the killing scenes), because it comes to my mind the