IQ tests, designed to measure general intelligence, are good for measuring certain cognitive abilities, such as logic and abstract thinking. However, they are not suitable for measuring the abilities necessary to form correct judgments in everyday life. For example, they do not assess our ability to weigh information or how well we overcome cognitive biases that mislead us.
Try to solve the puzzle. 5 machines produce 5 parts in 5 minutes. How many minutes will 100 machines take to produce 100 parts? Most people instinctively choose the wrong answer, which seems to be correct - 100 minutes - even if they change it to the correct one a little later - 5 minutes. When researchers asked this and two other similar questions to thousands of college and university students, including Harvard and Princeton, only 17% answered all three correctly . A third of the students could not give a single correct answer.
Here's another puzzle: Jack looks at Anna and Anna looks at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is there a married person among them who looks at an unmarried person? Possible answers are “yes”, “no”, or “impossible to determine”. Most people will answer “impossible to determine” simply because it’s the first option that comes to mind. However, by logical reasoning, we come to the answer "yes" (we do not know Anna's marital status, but in any case, a married person will look at an unmarried or unmarried person).
We are faced with similar tasks in various forms every day. And regardless of our intelligence, we often make mistakes. Why? Probably because our brains use two different systems to process information. One of them is responsible for logical thinking and argumentation, the other is intuitive and impulsive. When processing information, we use our intuition by default. And she often helps us - for example, when you are choosing a partner or in situations where you already have a lot of experience. But it can also confuse us, for example when we are faced with cognitive biases such as stereotypes or a tendency to trust information that confirms our own opinion.
Here are some prime examples of cognitive biases. Track how many of them you do during the day (but remember that the very presence of these distortions can prevent you from detecting them).
Dunning-Kruger effect
This is the tendency of people to mistakenly overestimate their competence - people with a low level of qualifications often make bad decisions and at the same time are unable to realize their mistakes due to their low level of qualifications.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is closely related to the "better than average" effect, a statistically impossible effect in which most people rate themselves above the average. There is also the opposite effect, known as impostor syndrome, in which a competent person is unable to attribute their accomplishments to their own qualities, abilities, and efforts.
Ownership effect
A person's tendency to value more those things that he already owns.
“As soon as I get an ashtray in some cheap shop and, having paid, put it in my pocket, it becomes an unusual ashtray, different from all others, because it is mine,” wrote Ayn Rand in her novel The Source. This feeling is common to all people. Because of it, we make irrational decisions, for example, refuse to exchange an item for something more valuable. Ownership effect is one of the reasons why the potential buyer of your old car will not pay what you think it is worth.
Hyperbolic discounting
Choosing to get something now, rather than something more valuable in the future.
If you had a choice - to receive 500 rubles today or 1000 rubles tomorrow, then, obviously, you would choose the latter. But the longer the wait time, the less attractive this choice becomes. Will you wait a year to receive 1000 rubles? As the waiting time increases, a quick reward becomes more and more tempting. This effect is one of the reasons why we don’t think about pension savings. But closer to retirement, suddenly the "future" is not so far away, and the choice of an immediate reward turns against us.
Deviation towards the status quo
A person's tendency to want things to stay roughly the same and to think that any change is a loss.
This distortion is due to our desire to be in a familiar environment and to the fact that we regret the bad results caused by new actions more than the negative consequences of inaction. This is one of the reasons a person continues to drink cola, even though blind testing reveals that he actually prefers a different brand (as happened in the Pepsi experiment ).
Blind Spot Distortion
An effect due to which a person notices the effect of cognitive biases on other people, but is not aware of this influence on their own judgments.
If you are prone to this (which is certainly true), you are not alone. Everyone thinks they are less biased than the rest. This effect is associated with a person's tendency to see themselves in a positive light.
Player error
The mistaken belief that if something happened more often than usual, it will happen less often in the future.
The distortion is also known as the "Monte Carlo false inference" - named after the famous casino incident in 1913. At one of the roulette tables in the Monte Carlo casino, the ball landed on the black field 26 times in a row, as a result, players who decided that the next time it was red was lost millions. In fact, the odds were 50-50. The
article is based on The Brain: A user's guide by New Scientist magazine .