We live with many biases every day . Most of these are unconscious and irrational. But we continue to live without challenging these fallacies. Some times we call these as “traditions”. On the outset, you may think that these are some kind of cognitive biases not related to you. But, if you really take a deep dive then you will realize how much negative impact they would have created in many areas of YOUR life. Most importantly these are very unproductive.
In our evolutionary process, some areas of thinking has not been upgraded in our brains. We need to consciously challenge our brains to shake its old thinking.
We just talked few (& very important) biases/fallacies in our series. Here are the seven biases we discussed.
- Social Proof
- Confirmation Bias
- Negativity Bias
- Authority Bias
- Survivorship Bias
- Sunk Cost Fallacy
- Social Hypnosis/Gender Bias
These are just few among the many biases. If you are hooked on to this topic, then I suggest you read “The Art of Thinking Clearly” by Rolf Dobelli. In this book 99 fallacies are described. You will be amazed to learn how much our thinking has been cluttered by these biases.
To conclude: “Intelligent men do not decide any subject until they have carefully examined both or all sides of it. Fools, cowards, and those too lazy to think, accept blindly, without examination, dogmas and doctrines imposed upon them in childhood by their parents, priests, and teachers, when their minds were immature and they could not reason.” ― James Hervey Johnson