Cognitive Biases: What They Are and How We Use Them

Introduction

Cognitive biases. When you ask the average person to provide an example of cognitive biases, they would probably struggle just trying to piece together what you are asking them, when in actuality, we all perform cognitive biases every day. Now, you might be asking, what are cognitive biases and how do you know that I do this every day? Cognitive biases are “a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment”. We all experience this, no matter who you are, what you think you believe, or what you think you know. In this paper, I will explain four cognitive biases and provide examples from my own life to show you that this happens to everyone.

Contrast Principle Effect

This principle says that we, as humans, believe that we can judge or evaluate anything without any source of influence or manipulation. However, that is not the case. We always have some sort of influence from someone, whether we want to believe it or not. For example, there was this guy that “slid into my dms” and was engaging in a conversation. Nothing too bad, but he was very forward with his responses and knew what he wanted. I did not have an opinion on him yet because I didn’t think of anything yet.

Then, I proceeded to tell my close girlfriends about him and I had shown them the conversation and they were bashing this guy completely. They said, just based upon his picture alone, that he wasn’t attractive, and he didn’t seem like he had his life together at all. After listening to them, I really wanted to fight what they said about him, but then I started to think the same thing when I was forming my opinion on the guy. A few months later, I texted him and apologized for how everything went down because I had my friend’s influence what I thought about this guy. Thankfully, he was very understanding, we are now friends today. Lesson learned from that event: form your opinion on people and state how you feel before showing them off to your friends, so you can influence their opinion instead.

Negativity Bias

This states that a negative event, saying, day, etc. has a greater impact on us than something positive happening to us. I believe this to be true because I can remember the many bad days that I’ve had compared to the countless positive days I have had. For example, during my freshman year, I was involved in a sexual misconduct case, nothing happened to me, but the aftermath of someone who was sexually assaulted. It was family weekend and I had my 13-year-old cousin staying with me for the weekend. We wanted to have a nice girl’s weekend, so we started off by going to the pantry to get some snacks that she would like.

Then, we were walking up into my dorm room, which was on the third floor, we get off the elevator and Jennifer, name changed for protection purposes, was in the hallway crying. You know the quote “no good deeds go unpunished”? Well, that statement is the most accurate phrase I have heard. Since my little cousin was there, I felt obligated to set a good example for her and ask Jennifer if she was okay. I could smell the alcohol on her and she said something bad happened and I asked her what happened, do I need to get someone, anything to help her out. She didn’t respond, so I invited her back into my room, so I could keep a better eye on her as well as know where she was when I went to try to go get help.

Once an RA was called up, I told her everything that happened and that the Title IX office could contact me if they needed any more information. A few weeks go by and I get an email from someone that works in the Title IX office that wants to set up a meeting to discuss everything that happened. I schedule a meeting, I talk to everyone that I needed to talk to, and that was the end of it for a while. Then, the week before dead week in the spring semester, I get an email from an attorney representing the University of Kentucky, but I didn’t open until dead week, wanted to set up another meeting to talk about everything that happened in October 2017.

It was now April. I was already stressed with finals, studying, and my mother was in a very bad car accident as she was on her way to work; her vehicle was totaled, she was fine, for the most part, but I was worried about that and now an official attorney wants to meet with me? I didn’t respond because I was freaking out about it. Then, about two weeks later, I get another email from the same attorney, asking the same question as before.

At this time, I was home and then I get another email from a university employee asking me when I was available for a hearing they were having, and I simply responded by saying that I could not attend this hearing, hoping that would be the end of it Then, I get another email from the same university employee saying that the hearing was canceled. I was very upset because the university put me through all that stress to just cancel the hearing. Now, you might be asking, how does this apply to the negativity bias theory?

Whenever I am asked, “how was your first year of college”, that event is always the first thing I think of; not making amazing friends, the feeling of being on my own for the first time, being happy, or all the other great things that happened. I think about that event that took months to get “resolved”. Because of that, I would rank my freshman year of college lower due to that, even though I had the best time of my life as well.

Out-Group Homogeneity Effect

With the Out-Group Homogeneity effect, this is when we categorize people of similar appearance, behavior, etc. into one group. For example, when people think of Muslims or the Islamic faith, people believe that they are all terrorists just because a few bad people, who just so happen to share one thing in common, commit an act of terror. My stepdad once believed that statement to be more true than it is false. He grew up in your stereotypical, small, predominately white, country town where everyone knew everyone and anyone who looked or acted slightly different from them, stuck out like a sore thumb.

My family is a mixed family, meaning both my mom and stepdad have children from previous relationships and such. My family is also literally mixed. All my brothers and (half) sisters are mixed, including myself. My mother is black, and my father and step dad are both white, so we have had our share of discrimination and racial acts towards us. One day, when Donald Trump’s presidential campaign came on the TV saying “we’re going to Make America Great Again” and other things like not letting refugees in the country, enacting a “Muslim Ban”, or “build a wall and we’re going to make Mexico pay for it”.

My stepdad agreed 110% with that everything that the Trump Administration was saying. It honestly broke my heart because he has witnessed what it was like to be discriminated against just for our appearance. So then, I asked him “why do you agree with what he’s saying? He can’t guarantee ANYTHING at all. He is just an American television personality and the rest of the world is going to think that we are a joke.” I did not completely agree with his response. I was so upset and frankly disappointed that someone in my family, who has witnessed racism, discrimination, colorism, etc. could think like that. He believed are refugees are bad just because some of them are coming from the Middle East.

I proceeded to ask him “what about the Columbine shooters? Dylann Roof? Any act of violence in America committed by a white man? Are they not considered terrorists because they are American? White? Male? Christian? What’s the difference? The people who were involved with 9/11 and people like Dylann Roof, the Columbine shooters, the Kent State shooters, pedophiles, rapists, sex offenders, whoever, should all be viewed as terrorists because they all had a mission to put fear in people’s hearts and wanted everyone else to feel the pain that they are feeling”. He was stunned. He never really thought about it like that before.

So now, slowly but surely, he thinks about things and doesn’t entirely jump on the “Trump Train” bandwagon. This ties into the out-group homogeneity effect because, with this, the brain categorizes people for how “similar” they appear or have they behave. My stepdad wouldn’t say that my family is similar because we are all “unique”, while those individuals who categorized us and committed racial acts toward us, thought we were all the same, just based upon appearance. He also believed that are Muslims are bad because of the Islamic faith and because of 9/11, while asked about Dylann Roof and others, they are nothing like him because he would never do anything like that, even though they both are white, Christian, males; now has a better understanding of how others are viewed when many say that they are similar.

Loss Aversion Bias

The loss aversion bias states that people would rather lose nothing, than gain anything. This could apply to everyone in life, especially Americans. We don’t like to lose, whether that’s sports, academically, romantically, etc. We would rather not win anything at all than lose. One event in my life that I could relate this to high school. At my high school, we had spirit week and during spirit week, we had a list of events that each class would compete in every day ranging from dressing up, bringing in food for the backpack program, bringing in pennies for the backpack program, powderpuff, etc.

My class, the class of 2017, was the most competitive class in the school; we just didn’t like to lose. A loss was more impactful than winning anything. During our sophomore year of high school, our rivals were the freshmen, juniors, and seniors. All week, we brought in the so much food, we dressed up, our girls practiced for powderpuff, and boom. . I have never seen a group of people so angry before in my life, even though second place is still good. We were so angry by the fact that we lost the spirit stick and bragging rights, which was the prize.

However, during my junior and senior years of high school, we went twice as hard and won back-to-back. We weren’t as excited or livid when we won as compared to us losing, we were more chill about it, not that we weren’t excited, we were, but it was a different type of rush when you are so close to winning but lose. The only thing we won was the spirit stick and bragging rights for the year and nobody really used or talked about it, but when we lost, everyone talked about it the whole year. Non-stop. Every day.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we experience cognitive biases every day, even though we may not know what’s going on at the time. There are so many more cognitive biases that I didn’t use in this paper that we all use every day. No matter what you look like, believe, speak, act, whatever it is that makes you think you’re different, we all still perform these biases every day. Now that I know more about these biases, I am sure to pay more attention to what I am doing and why I am doing it.