Cognitive biases: discovering an interesting psychological effect

Cognitive biases are psychological effects that cause a disturbance when processing information.

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

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

Cognitive biases: the mind plays tricks on us

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

Cognitive psychology is in charge of studying this type of effects, as well as other techniques and structures we use to process information.

Concept of cognitive bias or prejudice

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

The concept of cognitive bias first appeared thanks to Daniel Kahneman in 1972, when he noticed the impossibility of people to reason intuitively with very large magnitudes. Kahneman and other scholars were demonstrating the existence of patterns of scenarios in which judgments and decisions were not based on what was predictable according to rational choice theory. They provided explanatory support for these differences by finding the key to heuristics, processes that are intuitive but often the source of systematic errors.

Studies on cognitive biases gradually broadened their scope and other disciplines also investigated them, such as medicine or political science. This gave rise to the discipline of Behavioral Economicswhich Kahneman rose to prominence 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 thinking as a puzzle of irrational cognitive biases, but rather to understand rationality as an adaptive tool that does not mimic the rules of formal or probabilistic logic.

Most studied cognitive biases

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

Correspondence bias: also called attribution errorAttribution bias: is the tendency to overemphasize other people's substantiated explanations, behaviors or personal experiences.

Confirmation bias: Is the tendency to ascertain or interpret information that confirms preconceptions.

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

False consensus bias: 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 biasMemory bias: bias in memory can disrupt the content of what we remember.

Representation biaswhen we assume that something is more likely from a premise that, in reality, does not predict anything.

An example of cognitive bias: Bouba or Kiki.

The bouba/kiki effect 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 scholar showed shapes similar to those in Image 1 to several participants, and detected a strong 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 asked many people which of the shapes received the name "bouba", and which "kiki".

In this study, more than 95% of people chose the round shape as "bouba" and the pointed shape 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 showed that even children under the age of three (who are not yet able to read) already report this effect.

Explanations for the Kiki/Bouba effect

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

Calling the rounded shape "bouba" might suggest that this bias stems from the way we pronounce the word, with the mouth in a more rounded position to emit the sound, while we employ a more tense, angular pronunciation of the "kiki" sound. It should also be noted that the sounds of the letter "k" are harder than those of the letter "b". The presence of this type of "synesthetic maps" suggests that this phenomenon may be the neurological basis for the auditory symbolismin which phonemes are mapped and linked to certain objects and events in a non-arbitrary way.

People with autism, however, do not show such a strong preference. While all the 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.

Bibliographical references:

• Bunge, M. and Ardila, R. (2002). Philosophy of psychology. Mexico: Siglo XXI.
• Myers, David G. (2005). Psychology. Mexico: Médica Panamericana.
• Triglia, Adrián; Regader, Bertrand; García-Allen, Jonathan (2016). Psychologically speaking.. Paidós.