What exactly is cognitive biases in a simple term?
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It is any psychological/emotional pattern of thinking that prevents you from understanding reality in purely objective terms.
People will give more weight to information that agrees with their existing views and tend to ignore information that disagrees with their views.
The simple version is that people don’t like being wrong and so try to shape the world in a way that makes them right.
In psychology, there are basically explicit and implicit cognitive biases. Explicit cognitive biases are things you’re aware of. For example, “I really sympathize with the plight of starving kids in other countries, so I’m going to act on that by donating or something.” Implicit cognitive biases are subtle, unconscious, and often, very difficult to identify on your own. For example, you may not realize it, but you may go through your day avoiding eye contact with certain groups of people, or physically being further away, even when passing in a hallway. Implicit biases are very difficult to overcome. To see your own implicit biases, look up Harvard Implicit Association Test. You can take them for free.
Please note, it can be really jarring to learn your biases. They can even be at odds with explicit biases. It’s a fascinating field of study. My career path has afforded me the opportunity to do a lot of research about this, especially as it related to people with autism and neurotypical people’s attitudes toward them.
Edit: wanted to add, literally everyone has implicit biases. They are completely unavoidable.
The human brain works on patterns. Some of these patterns are logical concepts, and some of them are not. Some of the ones that are not, like confirmation bias or the framing effect or the Dunning-Kruger effect, are lumped together in the concept of Cognitive Bias.
They’re basically traps for your thoughts. There are [a lot of very common ones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) that people have been noticing for a long, long time. They are very easy ways to mislead yourself when thinking about things without a bit of care and knowledge.
One very common example is confirmation bias: this is the tendency to give more credibility to things that reinforce ideas you already have and less credibility to evidence that contradicts what you already think. In reality, you should attempt to weigh evidence on its merits without regard to your pre-existing ideas.
Another is the Egoistic Fallacy: this is the tendency to assume that other people think and feel like you do, and assume they are motivated to take an observed action by the feelings or ideas that would motivate you to take that action. In reality, they may have very different foundational beliefs and could take that action for reasons very different to yours.
There are many of these common traps that we all fall into every day. You can’t really prevent ever falling victim to them, but when you’re doing something important it’s a good idea to watch out for ways you may be misleading yourself by habits of thought that obscure the reality of the situation.
Your brain prefers certain things. Even if you’re not aware of it, your brain will lean towards things its familiar with or used to, or lean *away from* things its not familiar with.
If you play video games with selectable or customizable characters, there might be certain gameplay styles or character designs you’re drawn to that you didnt even notice til you look at em all together or someone points it out just cause ‘your brain likes it.’ It also works the other way which is why scientific studies like “Double blind tests” which, without explaining what that is to save time, helps combat Researcher bias since, obviously, the researcher is going to want to be proven right so they might subconsciously skew the test towards the result that proves em right
Brains are lazy. They look to shortcut having to make decisions about every little thing individually, so use rules that are often true to avoid this. These shortcuts are cognitive biases.
Just because something fits with a cognitive bias doesn’t mean its wrong – the issue is when they’re overused or incorrectly applied.
A lot of different biases exist, but they mainly come down to your brain skipping over the thorough analysis to an easy answer.
An example –
This person has a cough. So did that guy yesterday and he had the flu. So this person has the flu (recency bias). Obviously they could, but you’re skipping a lot of options in favor of that just because its more easily called to mind because of seeing it recently
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