Common Biases
The behavioral characteristics and generally the personality of an individual determine the kind of decisions they make in a given scenario(Ehrlinger et al., 2016). However, mistakes can be made by anyone during a decision making process. These mistakes made by the human mind during the process is referred to as the common biases in decision making(Ehrlinger et al., 2016). Examples of these biases can either be conformation, overconfidence, and anchoring. This essay, therefore, tries to elaborate on the common biases in decision making by examining three general heuristics and giving relevant examples of how these heuristics and biases affect the decision- making process.
Whenever an individual is faced with a problem that requires critical thinking to come up with an appropriate decision, the human mind tries to come up with “shortcuts” to reduce the task of making a judgment and coming up with an appropriate choice(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). These shortcuts are called heuristics. These rashly made decisions will eventually lead to desired or undesired consequences. The gaps resulting between the normative behavior and heuristically determined behavior are the biases(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
Three types of heuristics that can be applied in decision making: availability, representativeness, anchoring, and adjustment. The availability heuristic aids one to make a decision depending on how easy it is to bring an idea into the mind(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For example, in the United States, the FBI produced a report that said that only 12% of the crimes committed that year involved the use of violence. However, when this question, ‘how many crimes involved violence in 2011?’ is asked, someone will be quick to answer with a very high percentage because of what they see on the news of cases of rape, assault, robbery.
Representativeness heuristic describes ways in which people make decisions employing a comparison of information with that of their mental prototypes(Ehrlinger et al., 2016). This type of heuristic makes people make decisions very quickly without thinking much. For example, if somebody describes a woman who is kind, warm, and caring, the idea that hits the mind is that the woman is a grandmother. This is because the mind already has a clear description of the characteristics of a grandmother and when the information is presented therefore, all the mind does is to do comparisons and make a decision. The anchoring and adjustment heuristic tries to explain how an individual can come up with a decision by first having a starting point which is referred to as the anchor(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). The starting point can be a targeted value. The individual then adjusts this information until the acceptable value is reached.
The heuristic that describes a previous decision-making process I made is the availability heuristic. I have never seen an individual who died due to cigarette smoking. I had a rough idea of what cigarette smoking does to an individual’s health. Most of the people that lived around me believed that cigarette smoking is a form of enjoyment and its effects were just but a myth. This to me seemed to be true because none of the people I know had suffered the effects of cigarette smoking. I then attended a friend’s birthday party and here, my friends were smoking and they offered me a cigar. Basing on the information I already had about cigarette smoking, that its effects are nothing but a myth, I decided to take a puff. As time went by, I became an addict and used cigarettes regularly.
One year later, I started experiencing shortness of breath. Upon going to the hospital, the doctors found out that my lungs were affected. This led me to be on daily medications to help control the situation. Confirmation bias was evident in this scenario. I tried to find a source of information that would support whatever I believed in. in this case, the community I lived in confirmed to me that the idea that cigarette smoking had no great effects on the human body. This bias could have been avoided by reading approved and relevant sources of information from the ministry of health on the effects of cigarette smoking.
Conclusion
Common biases are made during decision making(Ehrlinger et al., 2016), and they can be: Confirmation bias occurs when people try to find a source of information to confirm their myths. Anchoring bias is basing your decisions on the first idea that was initially presented while the overconfidence bias comes in when one is overconfident that the decision made is correct depending on the source of information it came from. These biases occur in heuristics and should be overcome to come up with an appropriate decision.
References
Ehrlinger, J., Readinger, W. O., & Kim, B. (2016). Decision-Making and Cognitive Biases. In Encyclopedia of Mental Health: Second Edition. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-397045-9.00206-8
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124