Cognitive biases: discovering some psychological effects

Cognitive biases (also called cognitive biases) are a few psychological effects that cause an alteration in the processing of information captured by our senses, which generates a distortion, erroneous judgment, incoherent or illogical interpretation on the basis of the information we have.

Social biases are those that refer to attribution biases and disrupt our interactions with other people in our daily lives.

Cognitive biases: the mind deceives us

The phenomenon of cognitive biases was born as a evolutionary need so that the human being can make immediate judgments that our brain uses to respond agilely to certain stimuli, problems or situations, which due to their complexity would be impossible to process all the information, and therefore requires a selective filtering or subjective. It is true that a cognitive bias can lead us to mistakes, but in certain contexts it allows us decide faster or make an intuitive decision when the immediacy of the situation does not allow your scrutiny rational.

The Cognitive psychology is responsible for studying these types of effects, as well as other techniques and structures that we use to process information.

Concept of cognitive bias or prejudice

Cognitive bias or prejudice arises from different processes that are not easily distinguishable. These include the heuristic processing (mental shortcuts), emotional and moral motivations, wave social influence.

The concept of cognitive bias first appeared thanks to Daniel kahneman in 1972, when he realized the impossibility of people to reason intuitively with very large magnitudes. Kahneman and other scholars were demonstrating the existence of scenario patterns in which judgments and decisions were not based on the predictable according to the theory of rational choice. They gave explanatory support to these differences by finding the key to heurism, intuitive processes that are usually the source of systematic errors.

Studies on cognitive biases were expanding their dimension and other disciplines also investigated about them, such as medicine or political science. Thus arose the discipline of Behavioral economics, which elevated Kahneman after winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for having integrated psychological research into economic science, discovering associations in human judgment and decision-making.

However, some critics of Kahneman argue that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thought as a puzzle of cognitive biases. irrational, but rather to understand rationality as an adaptation tool that does not blend in with the rules of formal logic or probabilistic.

Most studied cognitive biases

Hindsight bias or a posteriori bias: it is the propensity to perceive past events as predictable.

Correspondence bias: also called attribution error: it is the tendency to overemphasize the reasoned explanations, behaviors or personal experiences of other people.

Confirmation bias: it is the tendency to find out or interpret information that confirms preconceptions.

Self-service bias: it is the tendency to demand more responsibility for successes than for failures. It is also shown when we tend to interpret ambiguous information as beneficial for its intentions.

False consensus bias: it is the tendency to judge that one's own opinions, beliefs, values ​​and customs are more widespread among other people than they really are.

Memory bias: memory bias can upset the content of what we remember.

Representation bias: when we assume that something is more probable from a premise that, in reality, does not predict anything.

An example of cognitive bias: Bouba or Kiki

The bouba / kiki effect it is one of the most commonly known cognitive biases. It was detected in 1929 by the Estonian psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. In an experiment in Tenerife (Spain), the academic showed shapes similar to those in Image 1 to several participants, and detected a large preference among the subjects, who linked the pointed shape with the name "takete", and the rounded shape with the name "baluba". In 2001, V. Ramachandran repeated the experiment using the names "kiki" and "bouba", and many people were asked which of the forms was called "bouba", and which one was called "kiki".

In this study, more than 95% of people chose the round shape as "bouba" and the pointed one as "kiki". This provided an experimental basis for understanding that the human brain extracts properties in the abstract from shapes and sounds. In fact, recent research by Daphne maurer she showed that even children under the age of three (who are not yet able to read) already report this effect.

Explanations about the Kiki / Bouba effect

Ramachandran and Hubbard interpret the kiki / bouba effect as a demonstration of the implications for evolution of human language, because it gives clues that indicate that the naming of certain objects is not entirely arbitrary.

Calling the rounded shape “bouba” could suggest that this bias arises from the way we pronounce the word, with our mouth in a more rounded position to emit the sound, while we use a more tense and angular pronunciation of the sound "Kiki". It should also be noted that the sounds of the letter "k" are harder than those of the "b". The presence of this type of "synaesthetic maps”Points out that this phenomenon may constitute the neurological basis for the auditory symbolism, in which phonemes are mapped and linked to certain objects and events in a non-arbitrary way.

People who suffer autismHowever, they do not show such a marked preference. While the group of subjects studied scored above 90% in attributing "bouba" to the rounded shape and "kiki" to the angled shape, the percentage drops to 60% in people with autism.

Bibliographic references:

• Bunge, M. and Ardila, R. (2002). Philosophy of psychology. Mexico: XXI century.
• Myers, David G. (2005). Psychology. Mexico: Pan-American Medical.
• Triglia, Adrián; Regader, Bertrand; García-Allen, Jonathan (2016). Psychologically speaking. Paidos.