So how do we work to defeat cognitive biases that show up in our thinking? The list of four is helpful, but nowhere close to exhaustive. The one thing you can start doing immediately, now that you know what cognitive biases are, is become aware of them in your thinking and interactions and note how they affect your sense of belief. But still, that feels inadequate against some of these thought patterns that have been left unchecked our entire lives.
There are a few specific mental exercises that can help retrain your thinking to become clear-minded and measured.
Practice thinking of alternative explanations. Instead of making a snap decision about why a certain thing is the way it is, try to think of multiple reasons or causes. Reserve your judgment and stop jumping to conclusions. You don’t need to find an answer immediately; emphasize the truth instead of speed.
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For example, if you’re sitting in your favorite coffee shop and you notice a huge drop-off in business, you might think it’s because the quality of the coffee has declined. But it could also be because more people are making their own espresso drinks, or because it’s summer and more people are doing other things outside. Or perhaps it’s that the prices the store is charging are keeping people away. (It’s usually that, actually.)
In a sense, this is like reverse storytelling. You are starting with the conclusion, but you aren’t sure what’s happened. Instead of jumping to conclusions, you would work backward and theorize what could have contributed to what you currently see.
You might try an exercise of taking a scene, a person, or any other thing, and observing five details or characteristics about it. Then, for each of those details, write down five possible causes that may have led that particular detail to be the way it is. Try to vary the potential causes you list, ranging from the plainly realistic to the downright bizarre. This will train your ability to create a story around every detail, thus giving you twenty-five trains of thought instead of defaulting to the quickest and easiest for your brain to process.
Most of us think only linearly in terms of cause and effect. But that’s ineffective at best in understanding a situation.
Reword your statements as questions. Think of something you consider a declarative, absolute truth. For example: “E-books and e-readers are killing literature.” That’s a pretty strong statement. But try rephrasing it: “Are e-books and e-readers really killing literature?” The mere act of turning it into a question makes your brain start looking for answers: “Well, maybe e-readers are encouraging more people to read—that’s good.” “They may be changing how we read, but they’re not really killing how literature is made. Maybe I’m just overly sentimental about physical books.” With just that one shift in your statement, you’ve opened up your mind to a new line of inquiry and exploration.
Get behind and challenge your assumptions. Let’s say you have a very broad belief about poor people: “They’re poor because they don’t want to work.” Challenge that assumption immediately: “Do poor people just not want to work? Or do they really have less opportunities? They’ve been closing plants and stores in town for a few years now—maybe they don’t have anywhere else to go. And it’s hard to get the proper training for a skilled position when you can’t afford it . . . What if there is something else that causes poverty? What if there are about fifty shades of gray to this matter?” The harsh truth is that whatever you think you know about a topic, especially if it involves people’s thoughts and motivations, you probably know only about 10 percent of what’s truly happening.
It’s always best to be proactive about challenging your assumptions through self-interrogation and especially through valid news and information sources—including people who have deep experience in the subject you’re thinking of. It’s uncertain where many of our assumptions come from anyway, so it’s good to reevaluate them from time to time.
Remove pride, ego, and your need to be right. The truth is a separate pursuit entirely from each of those things, and sometimes there is a stark contrast because you want to feel a certain way about yourself, especially in front of others. Truth becomes a lot easier to discern when you take your emotional rewards (and punishments) out of the equation and simply try to determine what’s real. If you face opposition, it’s just going to cause you to dig your heels in and deny, defend, and stonewall. You’ll be seduced into caring more about dominating someone than understanding. You’ll want to avoid that sour feeling of shame when conceding defeat to someone—anyone. Even if you’re right, very few people make friends by saying “I told you so.”
Picture how a desperately stubborn person would act—is that similar to how you are acting? Could anyone make an honest comparison between the two? Hopefully not.
Even more so, explore being wrong and understand the feelings that outcome evokes. Play out scenarios where you are indeed wrong. What feelings will you experience? There may be embarrassment, anger, humiliation, or shame—but do they affect the world or your life? Only if you let them.
Logical Arguments
A final element of watching yourself from afar (not dissimilar to a voyeur) is recognizing the naked truth of what’s being said. This is deceptively difficult, because just like with cognitive biases, by nature, illogical arguments go unnoticed. It’s rare that we dissect statements just to understand their logical underpinnings, and that makes for habitually sloppy arguments and poor understanding. It’s easier than you might think, and it is equally frustrating to see people commit these errors on a daily basis.
There’s a funny, if somewhat cynical, piece of “advice” for people who are a little unsettled about speaking in public: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with B.S.” In this context, “B.S.” does not stand for “Bachelor of Science.”
We’ve all been in conversations at least once or twice in our lives in which we realize that the person we’re speaking with is making not one shred of sense. They might be talking about a crazy theory they have or speaking from a viewpoint that has no basis in reality. Someone may try to convince you that things are a certain way, but for whatever reason, their words don’t add up. It causes a cognitive clog in your brain, and you might end up feeling disoriented or lost.
They probably think they’re making sense—they don’t think they’re trying to baffle you with B.S. But on the other hand, maybe they are. They might be trying to convolute your thinking with distorted logic and crazy talk.
Whatever the case, you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong, and thus you can’t form a rebuttal. That’s annoying, to say the least. Someone has gotten the last word on something you’re pretty sure is a bad argument, but you can’t figure out exactly why.
It’s important for you to know that, when these bits of nuttiness are hurled in your direction, it’s not your brain’s fault that you’re not getting them. The problem isn’t with your comprehension or ability to think—in fact, it’s the opposite. You’re dealing with someone who is defying the laws of logic, and while your ears are taking it all in, your brain’s not having any of it. Rightly so.
For the most part, this happens by accident in normal, everyday conversations where people are well-intentioned. People might be so eager to push a stance that they haven’t done their due diligence, or someone doesn’t pay attention to details and only wants simple sound bites.
We’ve all done it before. We get caught up in making a firm point, get flustered if we’re not convincing enough, and end up making statements that don’t seem to make any sense, because they don’t. We spitball on earlier statements in an attempt to salvage an argument, and hope they aren’t picked apart.
This is a situation where it’s beneficial to understand the basic nature of logical thinking and construction. In the world we live in, this understanding is a crucial mental skill to develop. It helps us ferret out the truth and process problems. It imparts the ability to parse arguments and statements and know if they need to be questioned further. In a way, it’s a mental model in itself—actually more of a mental supermodel.
Dissecting logical arguments sounds complicated—something you’d need an advanced technical or philosophy degree for—but the foundation of logical thinking is actually pretty easy to understand. The concepts are straightforward. They use sentence structure and equations to illustrate how certain ways of thinking are more effective than others. Understanding them breaks down to assessing the different kinds of statements people make in explaining a concept or an argument.
As a quick example, a friend may be trying to remember their shoe size. They say, “If I am wearing sandals, they will be size nine.” So far, so good. And then they say, “Therefore, if I am wearing size nine, I am wearing sandals.” Hopefully an alarm has been set off in your brain. That doesn’t logically add up, and you’re about to learn why.
