II. Cognitive Mistakes 1When you make a mistake, your mind fails. But difficulties are given to us in order to overcome them to discover the truth, and therefore I will assume that the experience of error is part of the natural course of events. We have all experienced similar experiences, when what we thought

Cognitive biases are thinking errors or patterned distortions in judgment that occur systematically in certain situations. Cognitive distortions are an example of evolutionarily established mental behavior.
Some of them serve an adaptive function as they promote more efficient actions or faster decisions. Others seem to stem from a lack of appropriate thinking skills, or from the inappropriate application of skills that were previously useful.

There is no end to the mistakes we make when processing information, here are 10 of the most common ones.

10. Confirmation effect

Confirmation effect manifests itself in the tendency to seek or interpret information in a way that confirms what a person believes. People reinforce their ideas and opinions by selectively gathering evidence or distorting memories. For example, it seems to me that on the day of the full moon there are more calls for emergency medical care. I find out that there were 78 conversions on the next full moon day, this confirms my faith, and I do not look at the number of conversions on the rest of the month. The obvious problem here is that this error allows you to give inaccurate information for the truth.
Returning to the above example, let's assume that on average there are 90 emergency calls per day. My conclusion that 78 is above the norm is wrong, and yet I fail to notice it, and do not even consider the possibility. This mistake is very common and can have dangerous consequences if decisions are made based on false information.

9 Availability heuristic

Availability Heuristic based on vivid memories. The problem is that people tend to remember vivid or unusual events more easily than everyday, mundane ones. For example, plane crashes receive a lot of attention in the media. There are no car accidents. However, people are more afraid of flying on airplanes than driving a car, even though, statistically, an airplane is a safer means of transport. This is where the media comes into play, rare or unusual events such as medical errors, animal attacks and natural disasters always generate a lot of noise, making people think these events are more likely to happen.

8 Illusion of Control

Illusion of control is the tendency of people to believe that they can control or at least influence events over which they have no control. This error can be expressed in a tendency to gambling and belief in the paranormal. In research done on psychokinesis, participants are asked to predict the outcome of a coin toss.
With a regular coin, participants will guess correctly 50% of the time. However, they do not realize that this is the result of chance or pure luck and instead perceive their correct answers as confirmation of their control over external events.

An interesting fact: when playing dice in a casino, people roll the dice harder when the number is high and softer when the number is low. In reality, the strength of the throw does not determine the outcome, but the player believes that he can control the number that comes up.

7 Planning error

planning error is the tendency to underestimate the time it takes to complete a task. planning error actually comes from another error, errors of optimism, which occurs if a person is overly confident in the result of planned actions. People are more prone to planning error if they haven't done similar tasks before because we judge based on past events. For example, if you ask a person how many minutes it will take to walk to the store, he will remember and give an answer close to the truth. If I ask you how long it takes to do something you've never done before, like writing a dissertation or climbing Mount Everest, and you don't have that experience, because of your inherent optimism, you'll think it takes less time than in fact. To avoid this mistake, remember Hofstadter's Law: it always takes more time than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.

Fun Fact: "Realistic pessimism" is a phenomenon where people who are depressed or overly pessimistic make more accurate predictions about the outcome of completing a task.

6 Mistake of restraint

Restraint error- the tendency to exaggerate the ability to resist some kind of temptation or "the ability to control impulse", usually refers to hunger, drugs and sex. The truth is that people do not control intuitive impulses. You can ignore hunger, but you can't stop feeling it. You may have heard the saying, "The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it" sounds funny, but it's true. If you want to get rid of hunger, you must eat. Restraining impulses can be incredibly difficult, and it takes a lot of self-control. However, most people tend to exaggerate their ability to control themselves. And most addicts say that they can "quit anytime they want," but that's really not the case.

An interesting fact: unfortunately, this misconception often has serious consequences. When a person overestimates the ability to control their impulses, they often tend to expose themselves to more temptation than necessary, which in turn encourages impulsive behavior.

5. The phenomenon of a just world

Just World Phenomenon- this is a phenomenon when witnesses of injustice, in order to rationalize their experience, try to find something in the actions of the victim that could provoke this injustice. This eases their anxiety and makes them feel safe; if they avoid doing such things, this will not happen to them. In fact, this is finding peace of mind at the expense of blaming an innocent victim. An example is a study by L. Carli of Wellesley College. Participants were told two versions of a story about a man and a woman. Both versions were the same, but at the very end, the stories differed: in one ending, a man raped a woman and in another, he proposed marriage to him. In both groups, the participants described the woman's actions as inevitably determining the outcome.

An interesting fact: there is an opposite phenomenon: The Cruel World Theory - with an abundance of violence and aggression in television and the media, viewers tend to perceive the world as more dangerous than it really is, showing excessive fear and taking various protective measures.

4. Contribution effect

Contribution effect suggests that people will demand more for something than they would pay to get it. This idea is based on the hypothesis that people value their property highly. Of course, this estimate is not always an error; for example, many things have sentimental value or may be "priceless" to a person, however, if I buy a coffee cup today for one dollar and tomorrow I demand two, I have no valid reason for this. This often happens when people sell a car and want more than it's worth.

Interesting fact: This misconception is related to two theories: “loss aversion”, according to which people prefer to avoid losses rather than gain, and the idea of ​​“status quo”, according to which people do not like change and avoid them whenever possible.

3. Mistake of self-esteem

self-assessment error occurs when a person attributes positive outcomes to internal factors and negative outcomes to external factors. A good example of this is school grades, when a student gets a good grade on a test, he considers this a merit of his mind or his diligent study. When he gets a bad grade, he attributes it to a bad teacher or poorly designed assignments. It's very common, people routinely take credit for their successes, refusing to take responsibility for their failures.

An interesting fact: if we evaluate the achievements of other people, the situation changes dramatically. When we find out that the person sitting next to us has failed the exam, we look for an internal reason: he is stupid or lazy. Likewise, if they got the highest grade, they are just lucky, or the teacher likes them more. This is known as the fundamental attribution error.

2. Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia- a distortion in which a person mistakenly "remembers" that he came up with something - a thought, an idea, a joke, a poem, a song. The imaginary event is taken as a memory. There are many hypothesized causes of cryptomnesia, including cognitive impairment and poor memory. However, it should be noted that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of cryptomnesia.
The problem is that the information received from people subject to this distortion is scientifically unreliable: it may have been deliberate plagiarism, and the victim is simply justifying himself.

An interesting fact: false memory syndrome is a controversial phenomenon in which a person and his relationship with the outside world are under the influence of false memories, which are perceived by the object itself as real events. Often the blame for the occurrence of such false memories is attributed to various memory recovery therapies, including hypnosis and sedatives.

1. The blind spot fallacy

The "blind spot" fallacy- the tendency not to admit one's own delusions. In a study led by Emilia Pronin at Princeton University, participants were told about various cognitive biases. When asked how much they themselves are exposed to them, they all answered that they were less than the average person.

Cognitive biases are an example of an evolutionary pattern of mental behavior. Some of them serve an adaptive function as they promote more efficient actions or faster decisions. Others appear to stem from a lack of appropriate thinking skills, or from the inappropriate application of skills that were adaptive in other settings.

The development and application of methods for correcting cognitive distortions that cause problems of an emotional, personal, social nature is the subject of various areas of psychotherapy, in particular cognitive psychotherapy.

Encyclopedic YouTube

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  Many of these cognitive biases are often investigated in relation to how they affect business and how they affect experimental research.

  • The illusion of clustering is the tendency to see patterns where there are none.
  • Illusory correlation is an erroneous belief in the relationship of certain actions and results.
  • Selection bias A bias in experimental data that is related to the way the data was collected.
  • The cascade of available information is a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief in something becomes more and more convincing through increasing repetition in public discourse (“repeat something long enough and it becomes true”).
  • Underestimation of magnitude reversion to the mean is the tendency to expect extraordinary system behavior to continue.
  • Deviation towards a positive outcome - the tendency to overestimate the probability of good things when predicting.
  • Optimism bias is the tendency to systematically overestimate and be over-optimistic about the chances of success of planned activities.
  • Attention bias is the neglect of relevant information when judging a correlation or association.
  • Gambler's error is the tendency to believe that individual random events are influenced by previous random events.
  • Fallacy, in the vein of Texas sharpshooter, is choosing or tweaking a hypothesis after the data is collected, making it impossible to test the hypothesis honestly.
  • Base percentage error - ignoring or insufficient use of basic a priori information under the influence of the specifics of the case under consideration.
  • The completeness error is the tendency to believe that the closer the mean is to a given value, the narrower the distribution of the data set.
  • Coincidence fallacy is the tendency to believe that more special cases are more likely the more often they occur.
  • Game-related fallacy – analysis of odds-drawing problems with a narrow set of games.
  • Embellishment of the past - the tendency to evaluate past events more positively than they were perceived at the moment when they actually happened.
  • The survivor's error is the tendency to underestimate data on the group of "dead" that are inaccessible to direct observation.
  • Stereotyping is the expectation of certain characteristics from a group member without knowing any additional information about his personality.
  • Subjective salience is the perception of something as true if the subject's beliefs require it to be true. This also includes perceiving coincidences as relationships.
  • Functional fixation - the use of an object in one capacity prevents its subsequent use in a different capacity in the same current situation.
  • The Hawthorne effect is a phenomenon in which people observed in a study temporarily change their behavior or performance. Example: an increase in labor productivity at a plant, when a commission arrives to study labor productivity at this plant.
  • The availability heuristic is the assessment of what is more likely to be available in memory, that is, the bias towards the more vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged.
  • The memory effect is the effect that people remember more events from their youth than from other life periods.
  • "Yo-yo effect" - a rapid weight gain after a short-term "hungry" diet, which allowed to lose significant weight.
  • The hindsight knowledge effect - sometimes called "I knew it would be so" (as an option - "But I said ...") - the tendency to perceive past events as predictable.
  • The recent effect (proximity aberration) is the tendency to value recent events more than earlier events.
  • The ambiguity effect is the avoidance of options for actions in which missing information makes the probability "unknown".
  • Observer Expectation Effect - This effect occurs when a researcher expects a certain outcome and unconsciously manipulates the course of an experiment or misinterprets the data in order to discover that outcome (see also Subject Expectation Effect).
  • The primacy effect is the tendency to overestimate initial events more than subsequent events.
  • Anchor effect is a feature of making numerical decisions by a person, causing irrational shifts of answers towards the number that fell into consciousness before making a decision.
  • The overconfidence effect is the tendency to overestimate one's own abilities.
  • The subadditivity effect is the tendency to evaluate the probability of the whole as less than the probabilities of its constituent parts.
  • Telescope effect - this effect consists in the fact that recent events appear more distant, and more distant events appear closer in time.

  Socially conditioned distortions

  Most of these misrepresentations are due to attribution errors.

  • Illusion of asymmetric insight - it seems to a person that his knowledge of his loved ones exceeds their knowledge of him.
  • Illusion transparency - people overestimate the ability of others to understand them, and they also overestimate their ability to understand others.
  • Bias in assessing the homogeneity of members of another group - people perceive members of their own group as relatively more diverse than members of other groups.
  • Distortion in assessing the role of the subject of action - the tendency, when explaining the behavior of other people, to overemphasize the influence of their professional qualities and underestimate the influence of the situation (see also the fundamental attribution error). However, paired with this distortion is the opposite tendency in evaluating their own actions, in which people overestimate the influence of the situation on them and underestimate the influence of their own qualities.
  • Ingroup bias – The tendency for people to give preference to those they consider to be members of their own group.
  • Projection bias is the tendency to unconsciously believe that other people share the same thoughts, beliefs, values, and attitudes as the subject.
  • Distortion in connection with the formulation of the law - this form of cultural distortion is associated with the fact that the recording of a certain law in the form of a mathematical formula creates the illusion of its real existence.
  • Benefit bias, self-aggrandizement bias - the tendency to take greater responsibility for success than for failure. It can also manifest itself as a tendency for people to present ambiguous information in a way that is favorable to themselves (See also Self-Barring.)
  • Trait description bias – the tendency for people to perceive themselves as relatively changeable in terms of personality traits, behavior, and mood, while simultaneously perceiving others as much more predictable.
  • The justification of the system is the tendency to defend and maintain the status quo, that is, the tendency to prefer the existing social, political and economic order and to reject change even at the cost of sacrificing individual and collective interests.
  • Self-fulfilling prophecy - the tendency, consciously or not, to engage in activities that lead to results that confirm the predictions made.
  • The herd instinct is a common tendency to accept the opinions and follow the behavior of the majority in order to feel safe and avoid conflict (see also The Majority Joining Effect).
  • The “door to the face” phenomenon - people tend to make concessions and agree to an unattractive offer if it is offered to them immediately after they refuse another more burdensome request.
  • The "foot" in the door phenomenon - after fulfilling an initially insignificant request, people tend to agree to fulfill other more burdensome requirements.
  • The "fair" world phenomenon is the tendency of people to believe that the world is "fair" and therefore people get "what they deserve".
  • The fundamental attribution error is the tendency of people to explain the behavior of other people by their personal qualities, underestimating situational factors, and at the same time overestimating the role and strength of situational influences on their own behavior, underestimating the personal aspect (see also Distortion in assessing the role of the subject of action, group attribution error , the positive effect and the negative effect.)
  • The Dunning-Kruger Effect - When people are incompetent at their chosen strategies for achieving success, they experience a double whammy: not only do they come to the wrong conclusions and make bad choices, but their incompetence also makes it impossible for them to realize it. Instead, they are left with the erroneous impression that everything is in order. (See also the Lake Wobegon effect and the overconfidence effect.)
  • The Lady Macbeth Effect (also called the "Pontius Pilate Effect") is an imaginary connection between moral and physical cleanliness that encourages people who feel shame to wash themselves, "washing" the imaginary dirt off themselves.
  • The Forer effect (and also the Barnum effect) is the tendency to give high marks to the accuracy of descriptions of one's personality, as if they were deliberately forged especially for them, but which in reality are general enough to be applicable to a very large number of people. For example, horoscopes.
  • The Lake Wobegon effect is the human tendency to spread flattering beliefs about oneself and consider oneself above average. (see also worse-than-average effect and overconfidence effect).
  • The halo effect - takes place when one person is perceived by another and consists in the fact that the positive and negative features of a person “flow”, from the point of view of the perceiver, from one area of ​​​​the personality of the perceived person to another. (See also stereotype physical attractiveness.)
  • The effect of the first impression is the influence of the opinion about the person, which was formed by the subject in the first minutes at the first meeting, on the further assessment of the activities and personality of this person. They are also included in a number of mistakes often made by researchers when using the observation method, along with the halo effect and others.
  • The winning side effect is the tendency of voters to change their minds in favor of the winning side.
  • The False Consensus Effect is the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them.
  • The effect of egocentricity - it takes place when people consider themselves more responsible for the result of some collective actions than an external observer finds.

  Memory distortions

  • Benefactor - the perception of oneself as responsible for desirable outcomes, but not responsible for undesirable ones. (Term proposed by Greenwald (1980), see also self-aggrandizement distortion.)
  • Apparent persistence is the misremembering of one's past attitudes and behaviors as being reminiscent of present attitudes and behaviours.
  • Cryptomnesia is a form of irregular authorship when a memory is mistaken for the result of imagination. For example, it may seem to a person that he himself composed a joke, while in reality he has already heard it and just remembered it.
  • Egocentric distortion - remembering the past in a self-aggrandizing manner, such as remembering test scores better than they were, or a fish caught bigger than it was.
  • False memory - memory impairment, expressed in false memories.
  • Retrospective distortion - filtering the memory of past events through present knowledge. At the same time, events look more predictable than they were in reality. Also known as the "I-knew-it-it-all" effect.
  • Introjection is a form of mis-attribution, where ideas hinted at by the questioner are misunderstood as being recalled.
  • Childhood amnesia - a very weak ability of adults to reproduce memories of a period of life up to 2-4 years old, can be explained by the immaturity of brain structures - such as the hippocampus and amygdala - responsible for encoding and storing memories and usually developing enough by the age of 2 years.
  • Placement bias - the tendency to remember oneself as having shown better results than other individuals in those tasks in which we evaluate our abilities as "above average"; also the tendency to remember oneself as having performed worse than other individuals on those tasks in which we assess our abilities as "below average".
  • Semantic cognitive distortion - the essence of which lies in the tendency to believe that you know the meaning of the word, although in fact, you know only the scope of its application and use.
  • Generation effect - information is remembered better if it is generated by the individual himself, and not read or received in any other way from the outside.
  • Processing Level Effect - describes the retrieval and recall of memories of a stimulus as a function of the depth of mental processing: deeper analysis generates a more reliable and detailed and longer-lasting memory trace than shallow analysis.
  • Disinformation effect - occurs when the reproduction of episodic memories becomes less accurate due to the received information. post factum information . It is a classic example of retroactive interference, occurring when information received later interferes with the ability to retain previously encoded information.
  • Illusion of the end of history - according to a large-scale study in 2013, people of all ages believe that their personality has changed a lot in the past, but will change little in the future. The effect is manifested at any age.
  • The self-reference effect is a phenomenon in which memories encoded with an attitude towards oneself are better remembered than similar information without regard to oneself.

  see also

  Notes

  1. Alexandrov A. A. Integrative psychotherapy
  2. Explanations from changingminds.org (English) articles on specific theories and hypotheses are provided with links to academic sources
  3. Doll A. Mental traps: Stupid things that reasonable people do to ruin their lives / Andre Doll; Per. from English. - 2nd ed. - M.: Alpina Business Books, 2008. - 146 p.
  4. Thompson, Suzanne C. (1999), "Illusions of Control: How We Overestimate Our Personal Influence", Current Directions in Psychological Science(Association for Psychological Science). - V. 8 (6): 187–190, ISSN 0963–7214
  5. Kahneman, Daniel. : [translated from English] / Daniel Kahneman. M.: AST, 2015. P. 328-329. 653 p.
  6. Gerd Gigerenzer. Understand the risks. How to choose the right course. M.: Hummingbird, Azbuka-Atticus, 2015
  7. Kahneman, Daniel. Think slow... decide quickly: [translated from English] / Daniel Kahneman. M.: AST, 2015. P. 475-489. 653 p.
  8. , pp. 153-158.
  9. “The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety” (PDF) . Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 39 . March 25, 2003 . Retrieved October 8, 2012. Uses deprecated |coauthors= parameter (help)
  10. Robert K Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1968, p. 477, ISBN 0-02-921130-1.
  11. Sergei Stepanov. To each - according to merits? // School psychologist. - 2004. - No. 25/26 (313/314) / July 1-15, 2004.
  12. Myers D. Social Psychology. - St. Petersburg: Peter, 2011. - ISBN 978-5-4237-0138-3.
  13. Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999).

  12 Cognitive Distortions Inherited to Humanity from Our Ancient Ancestors and Preventing Us from Rational Perception of Reality

  The human brain is capable of performing 1016 operations per second. No computer is capable of such a volume of work. But at the same time, the human brain is an extremely unreliable device.

  An ordinary calculator can perform mathematical calculations a thousand times more accurately than a person. Our memories are subjective, fragmentary and changeable. Our perception and processing of information about the surrounding reality is subject to many small interferences.

  Inaccuracies and errors in our perception are called cognitive distortions. They did not appear out of nowhere - each is caused by a severe evolutionary necessity.

  To survive, our ancestors needed to think as quickly and efficiently as possible. Our minds still tend to take the shortest route to evaluate new information. Such shortcuts to the thought path are called heuristics. On the one hand, heuristics help us make quick decisions in difficult life situations. On the other hand, each of the heuristics leads to the fact that we focus on only one aspect of a complex problem and are unable to soberly and adequately assess the environment. Here are twelve of the most common heuristics.

  1. Confirmation bias

  We willingly agree with those people who willingly agree with us. We go to sites that are dominated by political views close to us, and our friends most likely share our tastes and beliefs. We try to avoid individuals, groups, and news sites that might cast doubt on our position in life.

  The American behavioral psychologist Burres Frederick Skinner called this phenomenon cognitive dissonance. People do not like it when conflicting ideas collide in their minds: values, ideas, beliefs, emotions. To get rid of the conflict between attitudes, we unconsciously look for those points of view that get along with our views.

  Opinions and views that threaten our worldview are ignored or rejected. With the advent of the Internet, the effect of confirmation bias has only intensified: now almost everyone is able to find a group of people who will always agree with you on everything.

  2. Distortion in favor of your group

  This effect is similar to confirmation bias. We tend to agree with the opinions of people we consider members of our group and reject the opinions of people from other groups.

  It is a manifestation of our most primitive tendencies. We strive to be at one with the members of our tribe. At the level of neurobiology, this behavior is associated with the neurotransmitter oxytocin. This is a hormone of the hypothalamus, which has a powerful effect on the psycho-emotional sphere of a person. Immediately after birth, oxytocin is involved in shaping the relationship between mother and child, and more broadly helps us form strong bonds with people in our circle.

  At the same time, oxytocin makes us suspicious, fearful, and even dismissive of strangers. This is a product of evolution, in which only those groups of people survived who successfully interacted with each other within the tribe and effectively repelled the attacks of outsiders.

  In our time, the cognitive bias in favor of our own group makes us unjustifiably highly appreciate the capabilities and merits of close people and deny the presence of such in persons we personally do not know.

  3. Rationalization after purchase

  Remember the last time you bought something you didn't need, didn't work, or was just too expensive? You must have convinced yourself for a very long time that you did the right thing.

  This effect is also known as Stockholm Buyer Syndrome. This is a defense mechanism built into each of us, forcing us to look for arguments to justify our actions. Unconsciously, we strive to prove that the money was well spent. Especially if the money was big. Social psychology explains the effect of rationalization simply: a person is ready to do anything to avoid cognitive dissonance.

  By buying something unnecessary, we create a conflict between the desired and the actual. To relieve psychological discomfort, the real has to be passed off for a long time and carefully as the desired.

  4. Player Effect

  In the scientific literature, it is called the player's error or the false Monte Carlo conclusion. We tend to assume that many random events depend on previous random events.

  The classic example is coin tossing. We flipped the coin five times. If the eagle fell out more often, then we will assume that the sixth time should fall out tails. If it comes up tails five times, we will think that heads must come up the sixth time. In fact, the probability of getting heads or tails on the sixth throw is the same as on the previous five: 50 to 50.

  Each subsequent coin toss is statistically independent of the previous one. The probability of each of the outcomes is always 50%, but on an intuitive level, a person is not able to realize this.

  The effect of the player is superimposed underestimating the return of the value to the average value. If it does come up tails six times, we begin to believe that something is wrong with the coin and that the system will continue to behave in an extraordinary way. Then the effect of deviation towards a positive outcome begins - if we have been unlucky for a long time, we begin to think that sooner or later good things will begin to happen to us.

  We experience similar feelings when starting a new relationship. Each time we believe that this time we will be better than the previous attempt.

  5. Denying Probability

  Few of us are afraid to ride in a car. But the thought of flying at an altitude of 11,400 meters in a Boeing causes an inner thrill in almost everyone. Flying is an unnatural and somewhat dangerous occupation. But at the same time, everyone knows that the probability of dying in a car accident is much higher than the probability of dying in a plane crash.

  Various sources put the odds of dying in a car accident as 1 in 84, and the odds of dying in a plane crash as 1 in 5,000 or even 1 in 20,000. This same phenomenon makes us constantly worry about terrorist attacks, when in fact one should be afraid of falling down stairs or food poisoning.

  The American lawyer and psychologist Cass Sunstein calls this effect probability negation. We are not able to correctly assess the risk or danger of this or that occupation. To simplify the process, the probability of risk is either ignored completely, or it is assigned a decisive importance. This leads us to view relatively harmless activities as dangerous and dangerous activities as acceptable.

  6. Selective perception

  Suddenly, we begin to pay attention to the appearance of some thing, phenomenon or object that we did not notice before. Let's say you bought a new car: everywhere on the streets you see people in the same car. We begin to think that this car model has suddenly become more popular. Although in fact we just included it in the framework of our perception.

  A similar effect occurs with pregnant women who suddenly start noticing how many other pregnant women are around them. We begin to see a significant number for us everywhere or hear a song we like. It's like we've ticked them off in our minds. Then the confirmation bias we have already considered is added to the selectivity of perception.

  This effect is known in psychology as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The term was coined in 1994 by an unnamed visitor to the Pioneer Press forums in St. Paul. Twice in a day he heard the name of the German radical Red Army Faction founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrika Meinhof. Few people are able to catch themselves on the selective perception of reality. Since we are positively bombarded with the names of German terrorists, then some kind of conspiracy is brewing somewhere!

  Because of this cognitive distortion, it is very difficult for us to recognize a phenomenon as a mere coincidence ... although it is a coincidence.

  7. Status Quo Effect

  People don't like change. We tend to make decisions that will lead to the preservation of the current state of affairs or to the most minimal changes.

  The effect of deviation towards the status quo is easy to see in both economics and politics. We stick to routine, bureaucracy, political parties, we start chess games with the most proven moves and order pizza with the same toppings. The danger is that the potential damage from the loss of the status quo is more important to us than the potential benefit from a new state of affairs or an alternative course of events.

  This is the approach that holds all the conservative currents in science, religion and politics. The most obvious example is the American reform of health care and patient protection. Most people in the US are for free (or at least cheap) healthcare. But the fear of losing the status quo led to the fact that no money was allocated for the reform, and from October 1 to October 16, 2013, the US government had to stop its work.

  8. Negativity effect

  We pay more attention to bad news than to good news. And the point here is not that we are all pessimists. In evolution, the right response to bad news was far more important than the right response to good news. The words "this berry is delicious" could be ignored. But the words “saber-toothed tigers eat people” were not recommended to be ignored.

  Hence the selectivity of our perception of new information. We consider negative news to be more reliable - and we are extremely suspicious of people who try to convince us otherwise. In our time, the crime rate and the number of wars are lower than at any time in the history of mankind. But most of us readily agree that the situation on Earth is getting worse and worse every day.

  Related to the negative effect is the notion of fundamental attribution error. We tend to explain the actions of other people by their personal characteristics, and our own behavior - by external circumstances. This is again due to evolution and selective perception of reality. It was much more important for our ancestors to receive negative information about unreliable or openly dangerous members of the society and respond quickly to it than to adequately assess their own behavior.

  9. Majority effect

  Man is a collective being. We like to be like everyone else, even if we ourselves are not always aware of it or openly express our nonconformism. When it comes time to massively choose a favorite or winner, individual thinking gives way to group thinking. This is called the effect of joining the majority or the effect of imitation.

  This is why professional political scientists have such a negative attitude towards election polls. The results of the polls are quite capable of influencing the results of the elections: many voters tend to change their minds in favor of the side that won the poll.

  But this is not only about global phenomena like elections - the effect of the majority can be observed both in the family and in a small office. The imitation effect is responsible for the spread of behaviors, social norms and ideas among groups of people, regardless of what motives or grounds these ideas, norms and forms have.

  The unconscious tendency of a person to conformity and the cognitive distortions associated with it were demonstrated in 1951 in a series of experiments by the American psychologist Solomon Asch. The students gathered in the audience were shown cards with images and asked questions about the length of the lines on the images. Only one student in each group was a real participant in the experiment. All the rest were dummies, deliberately giving the wrong answer. In 75% of cases, real participants agreed with the deliberately wrong opinion of the majority.

  10. Projection effect

  We are very familiar with our thoughts, values, beliefs and beliefs. Still, we spend 24 hours a day in the company of ourselves!

  Unconsciously, we tend to believe that other people think in exactly the same way as we do. We are confident that the majority of those around us share our beliefs, even if we have no reason for this. After all, projecting your way of thinking onto other people is very easy. But without special psychological exercises, it is extremely difficult to learn how to project the thoughts and views of other people onto oneself.

  This cognitive bias often leads to a similar false consensus effect. We not only believe that other people think like us, but we also believe that they agree with us. We tend to exaggerate our typicality and normality, and with them we overestimate the extent to which others agree with us.

  Not so many people share the views of cults or extremist organizations. But the members of the radical groups themselves are sure that the number of their supporters is in the millions.

  It is the projection effect that makes us confident that we can predict the outcome of a football match or an election.

  11. Effect of the moment

  It is very difficult for a person to imagine himself in the future. Without special training, we are unable to predict the further development of events, lower our expectations accordingly, and adjust our behavior. We agree to immediate pleasure, even if it portends the greatest pain in the future.

  This gives rise to the momentum effect, also known as the discount repricing effect. Economists are seriously concerned about this effect: most of the problems of the world financial system follow from the tendency of people to prefer short-term benefits to benefits in the distant future. People are willing to spend money and extremely reluctant to save for a rainy day.

  Also, the current moment heuristic is well known to nutritionists. In 1998, American scientists conducted a study "Predicting Hunger: The Effects of Appetite and Abstinence on Food Choices." Study participants were given a choice between healthy (fruit) and unhealthy (chocolate) food that they would receive the following week. Initially, 74% of the participants chose fruit. But when the day of the food distribution came and the participants in the experiment were offered the opportunity to change their choice, 70% chose chocolate.

  12. Snap effect

  When we receive new information, we correlate it with the data we already have. This is especially true for numbers.

  The psychological effect in which we choose a single number as an anchor and compare all new data to it is called the anchor effect or the anchoring heuristic. A classic example is the cost of a product in a store. If the item is discounted, we compare the new price ($119.95) with the old price tag ($160). The cost of the goods themselves is not taken into account. The whole mechanism of discounts and sales is built on the anchor effect: only this week, 25% discount, if you buy four pairs of jeans, you will get one pair for free!

  The effect is also used in the preparation of restaurant menus. Next to super-expensive positions, there are specially indicated (comparatively!) Cheap ones. At the same time, we are not reacting to the price of the cheapest items, but to the difference in price between a salmon steak on an asparagus podium and a chicken cutlet. Against the background of a steak for 650 rubles, a cutlet for 190 seems to be a completely normal phenomenon.

  Also, the anchor effect appears when the choice is given three options: very expensive, medium and very cheap. We choose the middle option, which, compared to the other two options, seems the least suspicious.

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