Understanding our Cognitive Biases

📖 Quote of Today

☀️ With the majority of our readers in the United States, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Germany. Wie ist dien tag? 🇩🇪 We are confident that it’s a warm Sunday today! Make sure to hydrate throughout the day 💧 

🤔 It wouldn’t be a Sunday without a thought provoking question to get us thinking intentionally about our lives. In which direction are your habits currently steering your life?

On with the newsletter…

⚡️Focus of Today

🗣 We're delving into an aspect of our minds that subtly influences our daily decisions and perceptions - Cognitive Biases. These are systematic errors in our thinking that affect the decisions and judgments that we make. Sometimes, cognitive biases are a result of our brain's attempt to simplify information processing. They're often a result of our instinct to create a narrative that aligns with our expectations and offers a consistent story.

🔍 Cognitive biases can distort our reality, leading us to make irrational decisions and judgments. By understanding these biases, we can work towards more rational, objective thinking. Here is where you can start:

1. Confirmation Bias: Our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas while ignoring evidence to the contrary. 🍒 

2. Hindsight Bias: The inclination to see events that have already occurred as more predictable than they were before they took place. A classic "I knew it all along" phenomenon. 🔮 

3. Availability Heuristic: Our propensity to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in our memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how emotionally charged they are. 🧠 

4. Anchoring Bias: The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we encounter (the "anchor") when making decisions. ⚓

5. Self-Serving Bias: Our habit of attributing positive events to our own character but attributing negative events to external factors. 🏆

6. Groupthink: The desire for harmony or conformity in a group can result in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. People may suppress dissenting viewpoints, leading to a loss of individual creativity and independent thinking. 👥 

7. Blind-Spot Bias: Failing to recognize your cognitive biases is a bias in itself. People are substantially better at recognizing these biases in others but are blind to recognizing them in themselves. 👀 

But here's the good news: by acknowledging these biases and understanding how they affect us, we can make better, more informed decisions, improve our critical thinking, and see the world more objectively. So next time you make a decision, take a pause, reflect, and make sure it's not your biases talking! 💡

Thank you too all the wonderful readers that are writing back to tell us that they benefit from these newsletters. We believe small changes can make a big difference. That’s why Little by Little started in the first place.

With love,

— Amir and Erik

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