Due to exposure of prejudice, people cannot make correct decisions about their emotional reactions to future events. Impact bias is our tendency to overestimate our emotional response to future events. People often overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional responses to future events. [Sources: 1, 7]
Emotional bias usually occurs spontaneously based on the individual’s personal feelings when making a decision. They can also be deeply rooted in personal experiences that also influence decision-making. Emotional bias is usually not based on broad conceptual reasoning. [Sources: 9]
Cognitive and emotional biases may or may not be effective in influencing decision-making. For example, from a personal perspective, cognitive biases can help people make the best decisions in the face of uncertainty. Generally speaking, although cognitive biases can negatively affect people in different ways, they can also be beneficial in certain situations. In a sense, prejudice is very useful and adaptable. It allows us to use previous knowledge to make new decisions. [Sources: 5, 9, 14]
As we have seen, cognitive biases can be problematic because they can distort our thinking and cause us to make wrong judgments and make wrong decisions. Cognitive bias can be helpful because it doesn’t require a lot of mental effort and allows you to make decisions relatively quickly, but as with conscious bias, unconscious bias can also take the form of harmful bias that harms an individual or group. For example, beliefs about conspiracy theories are often influenced by a wide variety of prejudices. [Sources: 0, 5, 8]
Unfortunately, these biases sometimes cause us to stumble, leading to wrong decisions and wrong judgments. Science has shown that we are prone to make all kinds of mental mistakes called “cognitive biases” that can affect both our thinking and our actions. Hence, cognitive biases make us irrational in how we seek, evaluate, interpret, judge, use, and remember information, and in how we make decisions. Rather, cognitive biases can sometimes positively influence our thought process, which helps us make optimal decisions. [Sources: 3, 5, 8]
Cognitive biases tend to arise at a more basic level of thinking, especially when they are rooted in people’s intuition and can lead to the exploitation of various logical fallacies. People tend to think in a certain way, which can lead to systematic deviations from rational judgment. Cognitive bias is a systematic thinking error that occurs when people process and interpret information in the world around them and influence their decisions and judgments. Cognitive bias is an unconscious error in thinking that leads to misinterpretation of information from the outside world and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. [Sources: 0, 3, 5, 8]
Prejudice distorts our critical thinking and can lead to irrational decisions. Bias distorts and interrupts objective consideration of a problem, introducing influences into decision-making that are separate from the decision itself. In fact, distorted thinking makes it difficult to share accurate information. This may induce us to avoid information that we do not like and not to recognize the information, which may lead to a more accurate result. [Sources: 10, 12]
When we know that there are factors that can change the way we see things, we are more likely to be careful when making judgments or making decisions. This requires careful observation of people and a lot of flexibility in approach and presentation. As a manager, being aware of these biases allows us to think about how we think and reduce the potentially negative impact of these biases. [Sources: 10, 13, 14]
And, just like in hindsight, this bias is associated with a memory error. Explanations Cognitive hindsight bias can result from distorted memories of what we knew or thought we knew before the event occurred (Inman, 2016). [Sources: 0]
Due to various reasons, your way of remembering events may be biased, leading to biases in thinking and decision-making. Retrospective biases can distort memories, make people overconfident, and change their predictions of future events. Generally speaking, prejudice is usually the result of bias in choosing one topic over another. [Sources: 7, 8, 9]
For example, confirmatory bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to seek, prioritize, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm their pre-existing beliefs. As we showed above, confirmation bias occurs when you seek information that supports your existing beliefs and reject data that goes against what you believe. This can lead to biased decisions as you do not take into account all the necessary information. This makes confirmation bias a potentially serious problem that must be overcome when a statistically based decision is to be made. [Sources: 4, 5]
Ask yourself what makes you react in this way, and if you might have a bias that affects your point of view. Trying to understand a problem from both sides can make you a stronger critical thinker and help you see the world with more empathy. [Sources: 10]
You need to make fair and rational decisions about important things. Do your research, list the pros and cons, consult experts and trusted friends. Only by filtering out the cognitive biases that inevitably occur when making a decision can you be sure that the best decision for you and your employees is based on the best information available. Since ethical decisions are often associated with very high individual and collective interests, analysis of how cognitive biases affect them is expected to produce important results. [Sources: 6, 11, 14]
We believe that discussions about CE will benefit from investigating the role of cognitive bias in judgments about CE and the subsequent development of methods that help people make less biased judgments about significant issues. Within this new perspective, we hope that future research can develop this hypothesis and develop effective imbalance techniques that can help increase the rationality of public debate on CE and thus improve our ethical decisions. Research on cognitive biases affecting human judgment has primarily been applied to the field of economic decision making. Key Points Identifying and understanding unprofitable cognitive and emotional biases can help a trader increase his overall profit. [Sources: 9, 11]
In the workplace, unconscious bias may be reflected in business processes such as recruitment and performance analysis, causing decision makers to unfairly benefit some people and disadvantage others. In this article, we will study common types of biases and outline what you can do to avoid them. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovich, and Amos Tversky introduced the concept of psychological prejudice in the early 1970s. They explained that psychological bias—also called cognitive bias—is the tendency to make illogical decisions or behaviors. [Sources: 4, 14]
In one study, researchers provided feedback and information to help participants understand these biases and how they influence decisions. Since then, researchers have described a number of different types of biases that affect decision-making in a wide range of areas, including social behavior, cognition, behavioral economics, education, management, healthcare, business, and finance. Decision making is inherently a cognitive activity, the result of thinking, which can be rational or irrational (i.e. based on unconfirmed hypotheses). [Sources: 8, 12]
— Slimane Zouggari
##### Sources #####
[0]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-bias.html
[1]: https://reflectd.co/2013/12/01/the-impact-bias-this-is-why-we-overestimate-the-emotional-impact-of-future-events/
[2]: https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Impact+Bias
[3]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-single-cognitive-bias/
[4]: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/avoiding-psychological-bias.htm
[5]: https://effectiviology.com/cognitive-biases/
[6]: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/cognitive-bias
[7]: https://www.spring.org.uk/2021/08/cognitive-biases.php
[8]: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963
[9]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/051613/behavioral-bias-cognitive-vs-emotional-bias-investing.asp
[10]: https://www.betterup.com/blog/cognitive-bias
[11]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00195/full
[12]: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-management/chapter/barriers-to-decision-making/
[13]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/cognitive-bias
[14]: https://blue-sky.co.uk/blog/how-do-cognitive-biases-impact-the-workplace/