“What if Joe jumps off a bridge, would you do it too?” You’ve probably heard (or said) this phrase at some point, from your parents, friends or teachers. What you may not have known is that There is a cognitive bias behind it and quite a story.
This is the Bandwagon Effect, which began to be used in reference to the effect of the musical floats used by electoral candidates to attract voters when making their political speeches, and which describes a gregarious behavior: on certain occasions there is a tendency to act by following the ‘herd’.
Cognitive biases are shortcuts that your mind uses when it needs to make a quick decision, but which can act against your interests. or the most logical and convenient option.
Vestiges of evolution, they are mechanisms that in the past helped humans to survive. Nowadays, however, we seek to go much further, so they can be a burden in daily life, in personal decisions, at work or even condition your personal finances.
For this reason, it may be especially important that not only adults, but especially children, know about them so that they learn to be able to identify them and not fall into them. This is what Elon Musk, co-founder of companies such as SpaceX and Tesla and the richest person in the world, recently stated.
“They should be taught to everyone at a young age,” Musk posted. recently in Twitterattaching an image with the title “50 cognitive biases you should know to be the best version of yourself”.
The infographic corresponds to TitleMaxwhich published it about 2 years ago under the premise that “Knowing this list of biases can help you make more informed decisions and realize when you are wrong.”he explains.
He then identified “50 types of cognitive biases that appear almost daily, in little Facebook discussions, in horoscopes and on the world stage, (…) from the subtle groupthink that sabotages your management meetings to the pull of anchoring that makes you spend too much money in a store during sales.”
Now, with just one tweet from Elon Musk (which has more than 60,000 retweets and 300,000 likes), he is back in the news. This is the Explanation of these 50 cognitive biases:
- Fundamental attribution error: We judge others by their fundamental personality or character, but we judge ourselves by the situation.
- Self-serving bias: Our failures are situational, but our successes are our responsibility.
- Favoritism within the group: We favor people who belong to our in-group as opposed to those in an out-group.
- Bandwagon EffectIdeas, fads and beliefs grow as more people adopt them.
- Groupthink: Because of the desire for conformity and harmony in the group, we make irrational decisions, often to minimize conflict.
- Halo effect:If you see that a person has a positive trait, that positive impression will spread to their other traits (works for negative traits too).
- Moral luck: A better moral position is due to a positive outcome; a worse moral position is due to a negative outcome.
- False consensus: We think there are more people who agree with us than there really are.
- Curse of knowledge:Once we know something, we assume everyone else knows it too.
- Spotlight Effect: We overestimate the attention people pay to our behavior and appearance.
- Availability heuristic: We rely on immediate examples that come to mind when making judgments.
- Defensive attributionAs a witness who secretly fears being vulnerable to a serious mishap, we will blame the victim less if we relate to him or her.
- Just World Hypothesis: We tend to believe that the world is fair; therefore, we assume that acts of injustice are deserved.
- Naive realism: We believe that we observe objective reality and that others are irrational, uninformed or biased.
- Naive cynicism: We think that we observe objective reality and that other people have a greater egocentric bias than they really have in their intentions/actions.
- Forer effect (also known as the Barnum effect): We easily attribute our personality to vague statements, even though they may apply to a wide range of people.
- Dunning-Kruger effectThe less you know, the more you trust. The more you know, the less you trust.
- Anchorage: We rely heavily on the first information entered when making decisions.
- Automation bias: We rely on automated systems, sometimes relying too much on automatic correction of the actually correct decisions.
- Google effect (also known as digital amnesia): We tend to forget information that is easily available on search engines.
- Reactance: We do the opposite of what we are told, especially when we perceive threats to personal freedoms.
- Confirmation bias: We tend to find and remember information that confirms our perceptions.
- Counterproductive effect:Refuting evidence sometimes has the unwarranted effect of confirming our beliefs.
- Third person effect: We believe that others are more affected by media consumption than we are.
- Belief bias:We judge the worthiness of an argument not by how strongly it supports the conclusion, but by how plausible the conclusion is in our own minds.
- Availability Cascade: Linked to our need for social acceptance, collective beliefs acquire greater plausibility through public repetition.
- Declinism: We tend to idealize the past and view the future negatively, thinking that societies/institutions are, in general, in decline.
- Bias of the status quo: We tend to prefer things to stay the same; changes from the baseline are considered a loss.
- Sunk cost fallacy (also known as escalation of commitment): We invest more in things that have cost us something rather than altering our investments, even if we face negative outcomes.
- Gambler’s Fallacy: There is a tendency to think that future possibilities are affected by past events.
- Zero risk bias: We prefer to reduce small risks to zero, even if we can reduce the overall risk further with another option.
- Framing effect:We often draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it is presented.
- Stereotypes: We adopt generalized beliefs that members of a group will have certain characteristics, despite having no information about the individual.
- Outgroup homogeneity bias: We perceive members of outgroups as homogeneous and our own ingroups as more diverse.
- Authority bias: We trust the opinions of authority figures and are influenced by them more often.
- Placebo effect*: If we believe a treatment works, it usually has a small physiological effect.
- Survival bias: We tend to focus on the things that have survived a process and overlook those that have failed.
- Tachypsychia: Our perceptions of time change based on trauma, drug use, and physical exertion.
- Law of Triviality (also known as “Bike-Shedding”): We give disproportionate importance to trivial issues, often avoiding more complex issues.
- Zeigarnik effect: We remember incomplete tasks more than completed ones.
- IKEA effect: We place more value on things that we have partially created ourselves.
- Ben Franklin Effect: We like to do favors; we are more likely to do another favor for someone if we have already done a favor for them than if we have received a favor from them.
- Bystander effect*: The more people there are around, the less likely we are to help a victim.
- Suggestibility: People, especially children, sometimes confuse ideas suggested by a questioner with memories.
- False memory: We confuse imagination with real memories.
- Cryptomnesia: We confuse real memories with imagination.
- Illusion of grouping: We find patterns and clusters (groups, sets) in random data.
- Pessimism bias: The likelihood of bad outcomes is sometimes overestimated.
- Optimism bias: Sometimes we are too optimistic about good results.
- Blind spot bias: We don’t believe we have a bias and we see it more in others than in ourselves.
*”Technically, it’s not a cognitive bias, but it’s another important form of bias,” he clarifies. TitleMax.
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