Human biases - parasites to our brain! (Part - 1)

Some of the human biases, which can help you

The anchoring bias, or focalism,

is the tendency to rely too heavily—to "anchor"—on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).

That's why it's important to hook people on certain beliefs

Anchoring bias includes or involves the following:

Common source bias is the tendency to combine or compare research studies from the same source, or from sources that use the same methodologies or data.

Conservatism bias is the tendency to insufficiently revise one's belief when presented with new evidence. This is why if people are fed with info about you then they can't change opinions so easily

Functional fixedness is a tendency to limit a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.

Law of the instrument is an over-reliance on a familiar tool or method, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Apophenia

The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. You can make people see unrelated things and build a connection

The following are types of apophenia:

Clustering illusion, the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns)

Illusory correlation is a tendency to inaccurately perceive a relationship between two unrelated events.

Pareidolia is a tendency to perceive a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man on the Moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Availability heuristic

The availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be

The availability heuristic includes or involves the following:

Anthropocentric thinking is the tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena

Anthropomorphism or personification is the tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.

The opposite bias of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanized perception, a type of objectification.

Attentional bias is the tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts. If you plant recurring thoughts then you can change your perception

Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of selection bias)

You have to make people notice something

The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterward

Implicit association, where the speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.

Salience bias is the tendency to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards. This is why people like to be surrounded by prominent and emotionally striking

Selection bias happens when the members of a statistical sample are not chosen completely at random, which leads to the sample not being representative of the population.

Survivorship bias is concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility.

Well-traveled road effect is the tendency to underestimate the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.

Cognitive dissonance

Normalcy bias, a form of cognitive dissonance, is the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster that has never happened before.

If people have a bias to believe that something has never happened before then they won't plan for it

Effort justification is a person's tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome if they had to put effort into achieving it. This can result in more value being applied to an outcome than it actually has. An example of this is the IKEA effect, the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product

Ben Franklin effect, where a person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person. If you throw crumbs then you have a chance to get something more.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Build preconceptions and you are good to go

There are multiple other cognitive biases that involve or are types of confirmation bias:

The backfire effect is a tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.

Congruence bias is the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.

Experimenter's or expectation bias is the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.

Observer-expectancy effect, when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it

Selective perception is the tendency for expectations to affect perception.

Semmelweis reflex is the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm. Hence, focus on the paradigm