By Jamie Su
From the moment you wake up in the morning, you are faced with a decision. Get out of bed, or hit the snooze button? Decision-making influences every aspect of our lives, playing a role in every part of our day. At its core, decision-making comes from a complex web of cognitive processes, influenced by psychological factors. Hidden biases and heuristics frequently play a role in the choices we make.
Cognitive Biases
While our brains are quite remarkable, they are not immune to errors. A cognitive bias is when the brain interprets information based on personal beliefs and experiences, possibly resulting in error. These biases often affect our decision-making. An example is the confirmation bias, our brain’s tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already believe is true, ignoring evidence that may prove otherwise. An anchoring bias causes us to believe pre-existing information, often occurring when dealing with finance and money, such as when examining prices. Attentional bias is when we pay attention to certain facts while ignoring others, such as focusing on positive factors and ignoring negative ones. These cognitive biases can significantly affect the decision-making process, hence why awareness is essential for mitigating their effects.
Heuristics
Our brains often rely on mental shortcuts called heuristics to process decision-making efficiently. However, taking the easy path does not always bode well. While effective for making immediate decisions, the result is often inaccurate.
Availability heuristic, for example, is how the brain makes judgements on probability and frequency based on how easily we can bring these instances to mind. This can often cause us to overestimate the likelihood of an event based on our ability to recall them.
Anchoring and adjustment heuristic describe how we choose an initial value and increase or decrease the value when providing an estimation. However, we fixate on the initial value, hence the term “anchoring”. When we get stuck on the initial value, we make insufficient adjustments, favoring the initial value.
Representative heuristic, on the other hand, is the categorization of events or objects based on their relation to instances we are familiar with. This often leads us to make decisions based on stereotypes or prototypes that we already have built into our heads. The representative heuristic is also associated with the prototype theory, developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The prototype theory suggests that we categorize different objects and identities, such as a chair, and average each category. Therefore, every time we encounter a chair, we compare it with our prototype, the most average example of a chair possible.
While it provides simplification to the process of decision-making, heuristics can easily result in error.
Conclusion
By understanding the psychological factors behind our choices, we gain the tools to make more informed choices. Cognitive biases and heuristics can significantly impact our thought process in various contexts, which is why awareness of the biases that affect our brain is essential to making rational, informed decisions.
References
Heuristics. American Psychological Association. (2017, November 9). https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/peeps/issue-105
Heuristics. The Decision Lab. (n.d.). https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/heuristics
What cognitive bias is and how to overcome it. Cleveland Clinic. (2023, May 1). https://health.clevelandclinic.org/cognitive-bias
Edited by Ferhia Ibro
Astra Stem 
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