Your brain is lying to you..

Your brain lies to you every day, and you don't even know it. The human brain is powerful; there's no doubt about that, but it has its limitations. Your mind loves to simplify information, mainly for speed, and this results in cognitive bias. These biases help you make sense of the world and reach decisions more quickly, but it turns out that we're often sacrificing accuracy for this speedy advantage, and this can have some pretty significant effects, especially when we're all doing it at the same time.

The way you remember something could be biased for any number of reasons, and that can lead to more biased thinking and decision-making. But sometimes cognitive biases are more related to problems with attention. Our capacity for attention is limited; even the best of us have pretty slim attention spans. So we have to be selective about what we pay attention to in the world around us.

There's plenty of different types of biases that affect decision-making, and no one is immune. We all do it. It's a bit mind-bending, really, if you think about it hard enough. It calls into question the true nature of reality because we're all just experiencing our own biased and subjective versions. It's easier to spot in others, and by the way, that's blind spot bias.

These biases are everywhere. Some everyday examples include only paying attention to news stories that confirm your opinions or attributing other people's success to luck but then taking personal credit for your own accomplishments. Yeah, we're all guilty. Most of us like to think that we're objective, logical, and capable of taking in and evaluating all the information that's available, but unfortunately, these biases more often than not trip us up, leading to poor decisions and then worse judgments.

But how can we even tell? Is there any way around this problem? And why does our brain even like to lie to us in these ways? It all goes back to the issue of time. Think about it: if you had to think about every possible option when making a decision, it would take a ridiculous amount of time to make even the simplest of decisions. We wouldn't get anywhere quickly. We wouldn't get anywhere at all, really.

So if you look at this another way, your brain is just doing you a huge favor. The complexity of the world and the amount of information available to us at any one time makes it vital to rely on some mental shortcuts known as heuristics, so that you can take actions more quickly. Take an evolutionary example: if our earliest ancestors had taken the time to consider every bit of information when trying to escape wild animals, a lot of us might not be around today. Using heuristics in these kinds of situations would have undoubtedly been helpful and accurate, and they still can be.

But other things can get tangled up in these shortcuts, like emotions, individual motivations, and even simple things like your age. Decreased cognitive flexibility as people get older means that cognitive biases may increase too. As for knowing when our brain is telling us these lies, as I said, they're very hard to notice in ourselves. But for starters, it's useful to know what some of the biases that are messing with your decision-making processes are—you know, just so you can look out for them from time to time. But they'll probably still sneak by you anyway.

We tend to rely too heavily on the first piece of information seen, and this is known as the anchoring bias. During decision-making, anchoring occurs when an initial piece of information is used to make subsequent judgments. Let me explain. So, setting a high price for, say, a used car makes all other negotiations seem cheaper and more reasonable. If your initial price is high, all the other cheaper cars make it seem like you're getting a deal, even though it's just your brain screwing with you.

But you can avoid this bias. Now you know it exists; you can delay decisions and drop your own anchors so you're setting the standard, not somebody else. Not only do we grab and hang on to the first piece of information we've been given, but we also way overestimate the importance of it. This is known as the availability heuristic, and as a mental shortcut, it relies on the easiest example that comes to mind. If it's easier to remember, it must be either more important or more likely to happen again, right?

This particular bias can lead to bad decision-making because bad memories that are easily recalled definitely don't provide enough information on their own for figuring out how likely things are to happen again in the future. The availability heuristic will often leave you with low-quality information to form the basis of your decision, so you've been warned.

What about other people? Well, they can definitely influence your decision-making, even if you'd like to think that they don't. Most of the time, we can't resist the tendency to adopt a certain behavior style or attitude simply because everyone else is doing it. The more people that adopt a certain trend, the more likely it becomes that other people will also hop on the bandwagon. This is the bandwagon effect, and it explains trends in fashion, music, the rise and fall in popularity of various social network sites—the list goes on.

Other people—and when I say other people, I mainly mean people trying to sell you things—can also affect your decision-making using choice supportive bias. This is the tendency to remember our choices as better than they actually were. We have this habit of over-attributing positive features to options we chose and negative features to options that we didn't choose. The thought process goes something like: "I chose this option, so it must have been the better option."

In a way, it's nice; we feel good about ourselves and our choices and have less regret for bad decisions. On the other hand, we could just be justifying bad choices to ourselves without even realizing it, which is less good. Our minds will even conjure illusions for us, like the tendency to see patterns in random events. The clustering illusion is yet another double-sided trick of the mind, where we find patterns or shapes in random information when, in reality, no pattern exists.

Our brain has been designed to identify patterns because it helps speed up the process of recognizing people and things and ultimately leads us to make better decisions. But this same thing also makes us prone to type 1 errors—a false positive—which is what our brain does when there's really no discernible pattern. It just makes one up for us. Imagine how this affects things like stock market decisions and gambling just for starters.

Perhaps the most famous example of the clustering illusion and gambling happened during a game of roulette when the ball fell black 26 times in a row. By the way, the probability of that happening 26 times in a row is 1 in 66 million. Gamblers lost millions betting against black; they were certain that a long streak of red was ahead, but that just isn't the case. The odds haven't changed at all.

Another particularly problematic bias for society is the confirmation bias. As biases go, this is a pretty big one. In fact, it's been suggested that this bias by itself might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur amongst everyone. To put it simply, we're just looking for information that confirms what we already think—something that supports our existing personal beliefs and values.

We pick out the pieces of data that make us feel good because, well, it feels good. The examples are endless and can be found literally anywhere: social media, political orientation, social issues, climate change, religious beliefs—pretty much anything you can think of. We just stop looking for more information once we have enough to confirm our own beliefs. This, as you might expect, severely distorts our evidence-based decision-making because once the decision has been made, apparently we can't help but look for more information that supports it.

And if we do happen to come across information that conflicts with the choice, it's more often than not ignored or given just little consideration simply because it makes us feel uncomfortable. This is pretty close to the ostrich effect, in which we often take the decision to just ignore dangerous or negative information by burying our heads in the sand. We just pretend it doesn't exist.

For a change, let's look at a cognitive error that can have a profoundly positive impact: the placebo effect. This one is particularly fascinating; pretty much everyone has an idea of what it is, but not everyone is aware of exactly how powerful this effect can be. In an experiment, researchers blindfolded a group of people and told them that their right arms were being rubbed with a poison ivy plant. Their arms then reacted with itching, boils, and redness—classic symptoms of contact with poison ivy.

Now this in itself isn't really a surprise until you find out that the plant they used was a harmless shrub. The expectation of a reaction was enough for a rash to break out and to create itching and boils. They also showed the reverse effect in which the group was exposed to the real poisonous ivy but were told that it was completely harmless. Despite the fact that they were all allergic to it, less than one in six of them showed a physical reaction to the poison.

It's not just about reducing pain and other symptoms; the placebo effect can boost creativity as well as cognitive and physical performance, too. For example, in terms of athletic abilities, lots of studies have shown placebo effects on speed, strength, and endurance. So it’s nice to know that our brain can actually help us sometimes instead of hurting us.

These next examples are linked and are the foundations for the misconceptions we hold about ourselves, others, and the world in general. The first is selective perception. It overlaps somewhat with the confirmation bias and is the tendency to not notice and more quickly forget things that cause us emotional discomfort. We distort information so that we perceive only what we want to and any and all types of information presented to us.

This is a real double-edged sword because it's yet another example of our brain trying to do us a favor by allowing us to filter relevant information and avoid overload. Given the endlessly vast amount of information that we're able to perceive, this is more than useful; it's vital. But unfortunately, in many situations, this particular feature of the brain will once again also cause you to miss out on important information, too.

Besides the obvious aspects of your reality that this bias will affect—such as the media and the news you choose to engage with, your purchasing behavior, or your political orientation—it goes deeper still. Think about your romantic relationships, past and present, or even just the friends you have chosen. Then think about this: you ignore very important information about these people you spend your time with while overcompensating for the small things. Are they really who you think they are, or are they just who you wanted them to be in your head?

We can go deeper still. It even occurs when you build the concept you have of yourself because selective perception makes it very difficult to be objective, even about ourselves. So how well do you truly know yourself? Selective perception is about allowing our expectations to drastically influence how we perceive the world. This can be pretty dangerous in conjunction with the process of stereotyping. If we're selectively perceiving things, we're certainly not looking for anything to contradict our views about others.

This is why it's hard to change people's minds on important issues. We all know how problematic stereotyping can be; it's perhaps the biggest and most dangerous example of jumping to conclusions. Unfortunately, logic doesn't win out either. The emotional aspects of prejudice render sensible arguments against stereotypes useless. Unfortunately, there's no arguing with a stereotyped opinion, and the problem is, even though most people now know that conscious stereotyping is not acceptable, it carries on subconsciously and comes out in our behaviors, whether you're aware of it or not.

So please do us all a favor and think before you speak.

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