: are we making fair and just choices
Introduction
Figure 2. Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, “Ptolemaic system”
Decision making is intuitive. Whether we know it or not, we are making decisions every day: some are trivial, some are life-changing, some are rational and some are just a little too personal to handle. For example, as you step out of your house in the morning, are you going to take the cheaper MTR or the more expensive but faster taxi? What subjects are you going to pursue for your GCSEs, A Levels and higher education? How much money are you going to invest in Tesla? In the 2024 UK and US elections, who are you going to support? In most of these situations, in order to make fair and rational decisions, it makes sense to eliminate as many of our intrinsic faults in our rationale, cognitive biases, as possible.
Cognitive biases first came by as a quicker means of processing information, but over time they have proven to hinder our ability to make the best objective decisions. Our brains are astoundingly complex and, in turn, have lots of biases to help us process information. For instance, the below infographic shows all 188 currently known cognitive biases, more than realistically possible to cover in detail in this short essay.1
This article will cover 4 different cognitive biases and explain their implications on our daily lives in the hope of furthering our understanding of how our brain works and how we can best use it to our advantage. Confirmation Bias The confirmation bias is one of the most frequently employed cognitive biases.2 We tend to believe information that supports our pre-existing beliefs, and ignore those that do not. Sometimes, even when we are given neutral information, we interpret it in a way that favours what we already know. We store this information in our brains because it is easier to remember - an effect called “selective recall”. Why do we have confirmation bias? We like to make sense of the information we have - the quicker the better. In order to do this, our brains have learnt to interpret information by linking it to the knowledge that we already
Cognitive Biases | 12 Figure 1. Source: www.designhacks.co, “Cognitive biases codex print”
