Pruning thoughts with heuristics and biases
How do we simplify our thoughts to understand the complex world around us?
Behavioural scientists believed humans to be rational decision makers. Every individual could factor the probabilities of all possible outcomes and make a decision to maximise their profits. But are we absolutely rational in the real world where we have to make plenty of decisions with numerous outcomes in limited time? And the answer is no, our decisions are often driven by heuristics and biases.
Heuristics are time saving mental shortcuts that simply decision making for us. For example, if we know that the efficacy of previous vaccines were more than 90% but that for COVID-19 vaccine is 60%, we are likely to not get ourselves immunised from this new vaccine. That’s because the previous standards act as a prototype or a setpoint for us, and this prior information guides our decision (known as the representative heuristic). If a stranger asks us for help, don’t you think we’d help them when we are happy than when we are angry. In such scenarios, emotions bias the decisions we make (known as the affect heuristic). Another important source of bias during decision making process is culture. That’s why advertisement companies adopt different strategies to make ads in different cultures that influences consumer behaviour. Do you remember the case of Coca-cola campaign, when simply translated from American version, failed in China.
You may feel that heuristics and biases make our decision making flawed. But that’s not always true. Some researchers see heuristics as more accurate because they are fast and accurate, and significantly reduce the energy needed to make complex choices.
While biases exist among individuals, communicators play an important role in presenting the context and framework of information that influences an individual’s judgement. We should keep this in mind as we report scientific information to the non-scientific community. So, what are the recommended techniques to do this? Stay connected to find out how to mitigate biases to make communication more effective in the next blog.
Curious to know more or want to share your opinion? Feel free to post them as comments here!
