How Do Cognitive Bias Influence Our Relationships?

The English philosopher David Hume said, in the mid-18th century, that “man is a rational being (…) He rarely acts, speaks or thinks without a purpose or intention.” For its part, from psychology, a similar view of human cognition was held not too long ago. It was believed that most of the decisions we made were always based on logical and coherent arguments and that our way of bonding with peers was determined purely by rationality.

However, several decades ago, within cognitive psychology, a new perspective emerged that was completely opposite to the one we stated. This vision quickly gained strength within the scientific field and is still valid today. From this position it is postulated that human beings tend to make errors systematically when analyzing the information we have.

Furthermore, we tend to make distorted interpretations about ourselves and the world under the effect of so-called cognitive biases. Cognitive biases influence our social relationships in a much more significant way than we think, completely disrupting them. For this reason, In this article we will see what cognitive biases are and how they influence our social relationships

Why do we fall into biases when processing information?

Firstly, when we refer to a bias in cognitive psychology we are referring to the human tendency to make erroneous judgments about a phenomenon in reality, even having the necessary information to judge it in a manner adjusted to the factual data, to the facts. real. For example, it is common for people to base their judgments on biased interpretations in games of chance: “Since the roulette wheel has come up red four times in a row, the next one has to come up black!” However, the probability of getting red or black on a new spin is always 50%, regardless of what has happened in the previous four spins. We can rationalize this before betting and, however, we have all fallen into this type of trap on occasion.

Psychological research has shown that the cognitive system, like time, is stingy. This means that will do everything possible to invest the least amount of cognitive resources possible to solve a task One of the fields of basic psychology where the way we use our cognitive resources was most studied was the area of ​​attention.

A metaphor can be useful to explain the limited nature of the resources our mind has. We could think of attention as a limited set of tokens that must be distributed among various day-to-day activities. The cognitive system tends to bet few chips on those tasks that are mundane and unchallenging, such as setting the house alarm before leaving or holding the dog’s leash firmly so it doesn’t escape. The processes in which the cognitive system invests few chips are processes that we carry out automatically.

By automating simpler tasks, you are able to reserve more tokens for other more challenging tasks, such as arguing with someone on the phone when you are unable to find a solution to an interpersonal conflict. This very human characteristic is crucial for adaptation to the environment, since we would not be able to solve the problem we are discussing if we had to pay excessive attention to walking the dog, something we do every day.

However, this way of distributing our resources can lead us to make mistakes. By paying too much attention to the conversation, we can forget to set the alarm or loosen our pet’s leash and let him escape. Just as we make this type of attentional mistakes for the mere fact of wanting to save resources, we also judge in a biased and erroneous way out of savings, even when we have the necessary data to solve a problem logically. Biases are the unwanted product, as we will see below, of certain “mental shortcuts.” that our cognitive system takes to reason quickly and efficiently, called heuristics.

Heuristics and cognitive biases

At the beginning of the 1970s, at the same time that a body of scientific knowledge about attention was being produced, Kahneman and Tversky studied the way in which human beings judge the facts of reality. They concluded that human beings make calculations and solve problems of all kinds using heuristics. The heuristics are informal and intuitive strategies or estimates that do not guarantee accuracy but are useful for simplifying information and solving tasks quickly

They are extremely useful. However, the use of heuristics can sometimes lead to cognitive biases. A cognitive bias is, therefore, the tendency to attend to certain information when analyzing an event or conflict but systematically neglecting other aspects of the task that are equally or more relevant than the aspects that were attended to. We could say that biases are a kind of Achilles’ heel of a strategy as useful as heuristics.

Cognitive biases and their implication in social relationships

The literature on cognitive biases has been expanded, modified and questioned since Kahneman’s contributions, although his theory is today supported by a large part of the scientific community. Furthermore, research that portrays the subject of cognitive psychology as an imperfect subject and prone to making errors has expanded knowledge on the subject, reaching very interesting results about how individuals process social information in a limited way.

Curiously, when we interact with other human beings we tend to make a biased analysis of social situations. We tend to make judgments and make interpretations that confirm the information we have beforehand, but we also tend to overstate our positive qualities and underestimate our defects.

Research indicates that We minimize the time we spend analyzing negative information about ourselves, and when we do, we judge that that information is probably wrong Bias makes it impossible for us to see things as they are, which can be very harmful in social situations in which we must admit our mistakes or apologize to resolve a conflict.

On the other hand, we tend to remember our performance in some past activity as much better than it really was; We assume that our personal successes are rare in the general population but that our failures are common to all human beings. The reality is that these last assertions have a bias underlying them. If we could compare the real data of how many people achieved the same achievement as us, we would discover that they are not as few as we thought. We tend to ignore the frequency of a case within the population to use it to our advantage.

As if that were not enough, some studies conclude that we tend to judge the letters of the alphabet that match our first name as “more positive” than the others. These data could lead us to believe that we are egocentric, and we could say that we are (but not us, but all human beings). Ultimately, the use of heuristics and the inevitable appearance of cognitive biases is nothing more than a way to speed up information processing to ensure survival, it is a “shortcut.” We use heuristics to make judgments about our ties since, at an evolutionary level, the field of social relationships was one of the most necessary to preserve to survive.

The most common cognitive biases in our social relationships

The cognitive biases that we tend to fall into most frequently in social environments are three: comparative optimism, self-examination, and false uniqueness. Below we point out how these influence our social relationships.

1. Comparative optimism

Comparative optimism is the bias we fall into when We perceive that we are more likely than the average individual to have positive social events happen to us and less likely to experience negative situations. It is a tendency to minimize the consequences of certain risky phenomena for ourselves.

2. Exaltation of the self

Self-enhancement, also called positivity bias, is seen when we attribute the positive outcome of a task we perform to our personal characteristics—for example, a personal achievement—while we attribute failures to external causes.

This bias has, on the one hand, its negative implication on social relations, since could lead us to underestimate our responsibility for our failures or defects, which on several occasions could have even harmed another person. On the other hand, this way of explaining the results of an event has its beneficial part, since it is related to greater personal confidence and lower levels of depression.

3. False uniqueness

Lastly, false uniqueness bias is present when we perceive ourselves as above average in terms of our skills and abilities. Although at first it seems that it could be extremely problematic to believe that others are better, in truth, research suggests that analyzing information in a biased way can be misleading if we contrast it with real facts but at the same time it is beneficial to sustain one’s own individual and social image.

People perceive greater control of the world, we organize social knowledge more effectively and we explain our functioning and that of others quickly through these types of strategies.

Cognitive biases influence our social relationships all the time and it is impossible not to use them at some point or another, since their purpose is adaptive. However, we must be able to recognize them to realize that not all the judgments we make are based on strict reality.