In other posts, we have examined what evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists have to say about our thinking. They agree that we are hybrid creatures, with both an emotional and a rational component, and that our emotional component can hinder our reasoning ability and can even, by engaging in “chemical warfare,” bring it to a halt.
In this post, we turn our attention to the work of the cognitive psychologists who study the mental processes we use to form beliefs, solve problems, and make decisions. They have documented the existence of systematic errors in thinking that lead us astray in our attempts to reason our way from evidence to conclusions. They have uncovered dozens of these cognitive biases, including the following:
Confirmation bias is our tendency to look for evidence that supports our beliefs, while ignoring or even active…