I’ve been researching a new public seminar on overcoming disabling thoughts. A lot of problems arise from our cognitive distortions and biases, so I typed “cognitive bias” into the search box on Wikipedia. Wow! I hit the jackpot: Wiki lists over 100+ forms of cognitive bias!! And that doesn’t include those perceptual brain teasers like the classic one here [which horizontal line is longer?].
Think about this: over one hundred ways that we skew and distort events in the world behind our eyes. Some involve our behavior and decision-making, like over-relying on a single piece of data or seeing ourselves as less biased than the people we eat lunch with. Some have a magical quality, like the hindsight or “I knew it all along” effect or the clustering illusion where we see patterns that don’t exist. Several are social, like the Lake Wobegon effect, aka the illusory superiority bias, and the Forer or Barnum [“We’ve got something for everyone”] effect, which you might know from reading and believing your daily horoscope. And then there are those wonderful memory biases, like “rosy retrospection” and the self-serving and egocentric biases.
So if you think you have a firm grip on “reality,” take a stroll through the Wikipedia list. Then make your own list: what are the biases you’re prone to? What biases do you see in your friends and colleagues? For double the fun, ask your spouse or best friend to read both lists and comment.
Then watch your response … and see what new biases arise.
Oh, yea. The horizontal lines are the same length.