How Cognitive Biases Work
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What are cognitive biases and why do they matter?
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we are getting down to business, getting right to it here on Stuff You Should Know, because we've got a lot to cover here. That's right. So, Chuck, I got a little bit of an intro.
Let's hear it. Was that it?
That wasn't it? Do you remember how homeostasis used to come up a lot?
Yes.
So for those of you who haven't been listening that long, homeostasis is what your body and your mind and your brain wants to return to, right? You just want everything nice and even keel and normal and without exerting too much effort and energy, right? That's homeostasis?
Are you asking me? Mm-hmm. Sure.
Okay. So one of the ways that your brain returns to homeostasis as fast as it can is to use shortcuts in making decisions, right? Because if you're having to decide something, you're actively being challenged. You're not in your homeostatic space. So if you use a shortcut, you can say something like, I've had the red apple in the past and it was delicious. I've eaten the brown mushy one before and it was awful. I'm going to eat this red apple, right? Rather than going to the trouble of pulling both apples out and analyzing them with a microscope and all that, you can just kind of use a little shortcut. That's a heuristic. And it makes a lot of sense because your brain is like, great, I didn't use that much energy.
I made the right decision and we're good to go. The problem that comes about, though, is that with heuristics, you're not always right. You don't always make the right decision. You're not always taking all the information into account. And when that happens, you start stumbling into cognitive biases, right?
Yeah, like this is a frustrating episode because I feel like the title could be cognitive biases. Everything you think you know is wrong.
Yeah, well, it's a great title. Let's go with that.
It just it made me feel like a dummy the whole time.
Oh, don't. You're not a dummy. All humans are dummies as far as cognitive biases go. It's not just you. And this stuff is hardwired into us because, like I just said, we take mental shortcuts. And the problem, Chuck, is what we're talking about mostly today are unconscious biases. Right. There's conscious biases. We just usually call those biases, right? Those are the active challenges that you need to overcome to be a better version of yourself. Mm-hmm. These are like unconscious. So there's not a lot you can do about it. Although at the end, we're going to kind of give you some tips and pointers, but it's a challenge for absolutely everybody. It doesn't, it doesn't make you dumb.
Yeah. I mean, I think the tips and things can help for sure, but it's just part of being human, you know, the unconscious bias, and there's not a lot we can do to completely eradicate them. No. And if it's a, you know, if it's a real problem, then I'm sorry.
Well, one of the big problems that we all kind of face is that we are predictably irrational, as was said by Dan Ariely, who is a behavioral economist. And because of that, corporations, marketers, basically everybody who wants to sell you something knows about these things and they can manipulate those things. They can trick you into making decisions you wouldn't otherwise make.
Yeah, for sure. And we wouldn't even be here probably talking about this if it hadn't been for two kind of revolutionary thinkers who ended up being some of the more off-sited researchers in the history of research, as we'll learn, especially when it comes to economics.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are cognitive biases and why do they matter?
0:00–6:16
2
How do mental shortcuts affect our decision-making?
6:16–10:19
3
What are the different types of cognitive biases?
10:19–14:50
4
How does the availability heuristic influence our perceptions?
14:50–18:45
5
What is the impact of confirmation bias on our beliefs?
18:45–23:38
6
How do cognitive biases affect decision-making in economics?
23:38–27:34
7
What strategies can help mitigate cognitive biases?
27:34–31:55
8
How can understanding cognitive biases improve our lives?
31:55–59:28