Critical Thinking - Episode 2 - Cognitive Bias

[Music] hi everybody and welcome back to critical thinking hopefully you got something out of our introductory session last time what is critical thinking today we are going to pick up with another topic it's going to be on cognitive biases and i think most of you have heard the word bias before you know people say that that person is biased generally what that means but i want to go a little bit more in depth okay in the course on critical thinking you want to first of all understand certain things that are operating in the background before

we even get to reasoning right argumentation logic and applying those skills we need to understand things that sometimes get in the way of us being able to think about things rationally so we're going to talk today about cognitive biases or biases so let's actually just dive in and see what we get so a cognitive bias is going to be a factor that influences your thinking okay and a lot of times these are unconscious influences on your thinking okay so let's take a look cognitive bias defined unconscious there we go right there i didn't even read

that slide before i started talking unconscious features of human psychology that affect our belief formation right biases are factors that have an influence both on how we think and also what we think all right so they're going to influence um the whole thought process in a certain way but they're also going to have an impact on the beliefs that we tend to attach ourselves to okay that would be the what that we think and a lot of people in the field of psychology study this kind of stuff there's all kinds of tests that have been

done to identify different biases different psychological factors that are involved in our belief formation and we're not obviously going to be dealing with all of this stuff from a psychological point of view but the terminology we're going to pick up on some of the major ones and they're going to be a ton that we're just not going to be able to deal with so i just want to go over some basic examples of cognitive bias and generally what it is and i think as we go you're going to realize how often you encounter these things

right and part of the reason we want to look at this and i'm kind of fumbling around for the right words is because if you understand that these biases exist you'll be able to recognize them in yourself and what we ultimately want to be able to do is not just evaluate what other people are saying and realize where they've got a bias that might be coloring their perspective we also want to identify the same things in ourselves right so you know i notice that i am doing the same thing right or i've got the same

attachment to this belief and it's in spite of you know the reasons that have been presented to me and it's probably due to this particular bias that's what we're kind of after here okay so okay varieties types of bias first one is what we might call a belief bias and that's a tendency to evaluate reasoning by the believability of the conclusion in other words you may hold to certain beliefs and we have a tendency to think an argument presented for that belief is a good argument when in fact it's not a good argument merely based

on the fact that we believe the conclusion right i already believe what that argument is trying to prove therefore i fall for um the argument itself and when we get a little bit more in depth when we analyze arguments you're going to realize that that's actually a pretty dangerous thing to do a belief or a conclusion of an argument is in a way related to its premises but if it's a true conclusion it could still be a true conclusion even if the argument that is supposed to convince you of that as a bad argument or

has false premises okay so there's a certain relationship between premises and a conclusion that's really necessary and essential but just because we believe a conclusion doesn't mean the argument that was presented for it is a good argument i think you all have heard that before and understand that in a general way but that's the belief bias we tend to fall for things when we already believe the truth okay i know that i did that in the past i look back and you know i remember certain arguments that were presented for something i thought oh that's

a really really good argument i um i like that i'm going to even use that argument and later on once i really started getting into logic and critical thinking i looked back at some of those same arguments and i was like that's a terrible argument that argument makes um no you know that doesn't make no any sense but um it's just a bad argument how could i have been convinced that that was supporting this particular belief well it was because i have a belief bias and i already believed the conclusion therefore i thought the argument

for that conclusion was good okay so that's the first one belief bias development availability heuristic you're going to see me do this all semester get tongue tied basically is assigning a probability to a type of event based on how often we think about that type of event if you let me give you an example i'm trying to give you examples when i can think of them off the top of my head but say you are the type of person that watches youtube all the time and you tend to watch particular types of reporting um of

certain events maybe from a particular political perspective and they seem to characterize the general atmosphere in this country in a particular manner you're going to start to think um very much that the country really is the way it's being presented because you tend to be viewing it always from that perspective maybe a better example would be when you watch the news regularly it doesn't matter what perspective it is just say that the news generally has bad you know events of bad happenings right crime is is up you you see you know killing and theft and

all that kind of stuff on a regular basis and you tend to be thinking about it very often you're going to ultimately overestimate the probability that you personally are going to become a victim you know to a particular type of crime right so again this is the idea that you just assume the probability is higher for a type of event based on you thinking about that type of event right so in reality perhaps it's not as common as you come to believe okay so it's this idea of availability the heuristic in general are the rules

that we unconsciously follow when we estimate probability so um that's a different type of belief bias all right so going on to some others false consensus effect the false consensus effect is a tendency to believe that our views and the views of those in our sphere right our close circle of friends or activity are shared more widely than they are when you surround yourself with a particular type of person and we all do this we right we tend to gravitate to people that are like us we tend to gravitate towards people that hold similar beliefs

have similar values people of our own culture right it's not universal it's not that we don't have you know diverse collection of friends but even in that diverse collection of friends the people that tend to form your closest circle or those that are going to have views you hold or share views and values like i said there are exceptions but we associate in those groups and then we tend to think that so many more people outside of our group also hold like obviously everybody in my close group believes this therefore i think most people believe

the same thing and that again is the false consensus all right you might actually be in a very minority viewpoint i don't realize it because of this particular cognitive bias okay so that's the false consensus effect then you've got the bandwagon effect which also has to do with your associations right it's this unconscious tendency to align your beliefs with that of a group based on association or popularity or something like that i want to be part of this group right i'm going to believe the way they do it's probably something that we would associate with

the term peer pressure right you want to be accepted in a particular sphere so you're going to modify your beliefs you're going to modify your behavior to do that it's called the bandwagon effect at the cognitive bias we're not even aware that we're doing it okay a lot of times other people can come along and recognize uh certain types of behavior that we ourselves haven't picked up on okay um and it really does again have to go back to psychology and natural human desire for acceptance right the idea that human beings are very social beings

makes a lot of sense why we would operate this way why these types of biases would exist okay so that's called the bandwagon effect and there are actually other terms for some of these biases i'm just giving you some general ones because like i said this is just an overview here's two that just came up together again my powerpoint doesn't always work as smoothly as i had hoped but the negativity bias this is a bias that leads us to way negative information more heavily than positive information so when you're maybe doing a pro and con

list of reasons why you want to do something so you're planning on starting a business and you're going to make a list and say okay these are the reasons why i should start the business these are the reasons why i shouldn't start the business these are the positive benefits that i'm going to get and these are the negative risks that i'm going to undertake there's a tendency to weigh the negative more heavily than the positive right you say okay well there's some big negatives i'm going to be really hesitant even if you actually have a

longer list of positive benefits okay it has again to do with human emotion has to do with our psychology um you know probably our survival instinct right if you're gonna say okay i'm gonna go should i go bungee jumping right you know some people you know no big deal this is you know a thrill it's exciting you get this emotional high you enjoy the experience but in the negative category you know what if the chord breaks what if uh a chord's too long what if i hit the bottom and die um you know some people

and again there are exceptions people can overcome their biases that's one of the big takeaways i think today but maybe you're going to weigh the possibility of death a little bit more highly than the possibility of just having a good time right that might be a very rational way to weigh things but i'm just saying in general our negative bias is going to lead us to evaluate or weigh negative possibilities more highly than the positive then you've got the in-group bias which sounds a little bit like the bandwagon fallacy or you know the false consensus

belief and again there's some social aspects that are going to make some of these overlap but the in-group bias is a tendency to see members of our group as possessing more positive characteristics than members of another group you are in my group therefore you couldn't possibly be a bad person you can't possibly have this negative characteristic or that negative characteristic right my you know my group are positive people i usually at this point in the class would show a clip from survivor i'm a huge survivor fan and one of the things i don't know if

you're familiar with survivor but it's a you know a reality tv show that's been on for i forget how long probably 20 years plus at this point and they even bill it as kind of this social experiment which it is and especially prevalent in the earlier seasons what i'm going to mention is this idea of the in-group bias if you're a fan of the show you realize that people have kind of overcome these tendencies that you would see much more often in the earlier episodes but the way the show works is a bunch of strangers

are put onto you know a deserted islander or someplace uh to basically survive and compete with another group and they're divided randomly into two groups maybe it's not always random sometimes it's based on certain characteristics but the interesting thing that happens when these groups are formed on the very first episode is the groups immediately start to form attachments i want to say alliances because in the very beginning you didn't have alliances per se but you did have certain attachments and what they would do in the middle of the series is they would break the groups

apart and reorganize them and it's interesting to see how people that have formed their attachments with their original group still maintain those allegiances when the groups have been mixed together and it's because we kind of have this unconscious attachment based on the groupings and the thing that always shocked me is i'm thinking you know you're put into this group randomly you didn't make a voluntary association and there may be people on the other group that you're now put with that actually are much more in line with your character much more you know people that you

would normally associate and make closer friendships with than the people you originally associated with yet people continued to maintain their allegiance to the previous tribe members like i said i mean if you're a fan of the show you know these things often you know break apart and have all kinds of things that happen and that's not always the case but there was a tendency that you could observe in the earlier seasons where that was the case and i think it's due to this particular bias anyways enough about survivor let's look at a few other types

obedience to authority phenomenon which sounds weird because we also have a tendency to rebel against authority so there are different biases that seem to be contradictory and you know you could evaluate when certain ones are more in play than others or whether you know some of these psychological categories are just not real i mean you could question any of these if you like but the obedience to authority phenomenon is just a tendency to obey authorities and this may be an unconscious bias and it might not be a natural bias you might say natural maybe based

in something like a human nature and i want to get into a whole philosophical area about what it is to be human innate abilities and proclivities and stuff like that versus those that are socially endowed but you know whether it's something that we're born with or developed because of socialization really doesn't matter there seems to be a tendency to obey authorities in an unconscious way uh maybe a respect when you look at the philosophy of emmanuel kant he talks about the respect for duty uh and authority and things like that so i think it's just

a recognition of this type of thing if you want to see examples of the obedience to authority bias you could actually look back at some of the events of the 20th century this is when social psychologists really began to discover this particular feature of human psychology i guess you could say if you look back at the events of world war ii once the war was coming to a close and people started to find out about what had been going on in the concentration camps in nazi germany obviously questions emerged as to how you can get

your ordinary everyday average german people soldiers to carry out some of the atrocities that have been going on in these camps clearly many of the people that were on trial at nuremberg basically said they were just following orders one of the most famous experiments that was actually done by social psychologists were the milgram experiments that were done back in 1961 at yale university by stanley milgram where he took regular people from all different education levels put them in an experimental situation where they were playing the role of a teacher he had actors playing the roles

of learners and the experiment was set up to to basically test the teacher to see if they would be willing to administer electric shocks at increasingly high voltage to the supposed learner as they were commanded to by the people that were conducting the experiment and the interesting results were that about 60 or more of the participants apparently applied fatal levels of electric shock to these people um what would have been fatal shocks just you know against their own conscience now there's been some question as to the validity of the experiment other people later have come

out and said well not everybody really believed that they were in an actual situation and that they weren't actually delivering the shocks and maybe 50 of the people that were conducting the experiment believed it was fake and those are the ones that tended to administer the higher voltage and even out of them it wasn't a full group let's take a look at a little clip of the milgram uh footage they predicted that only a little more than one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board yet actually fifty percent

of the subjects obey the experimenter's commands fully in the experiment depicted in this film under 65 votes time continue please go on there's a lot of them here you know they have a heart condition down you remember to go just continue please sharp axe needle stick blade 180 volts what if something happens to him the experiment requires that you continue teaching yeah but uh i'm not going to get that man sick of that i mean he's hotter than that you know what i mean i mean whether learner likes it or not we must go on

until he's learning all the words i've refused to take the responsibility i'm getting hurt in that i'm not i mean he's under hollering it's absolutely essential that you continue teaching there's too many left here and i mean jesus he gets wrong here there's too many of them left i mean who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman i'm responsible for anything that happens here continue please all right next one slow wrong answer his neck 300 volts [Music] i absolutely refuse to answer anymore get me out of here you can't hold me

here get me out if the learner doesn't answer in a reasonable time about four or five seconds consider the answer wrong and follow the same procedures you have been doing for wrong answers say wrong telling the number of votes given the punishment reading the correct answer oh man continue please something's happened to that man there nice and gold dollar necklace moon paint something's happened to that man and you better check in on him sir he won't answer me or nothing please continue go on please you accept all responsibility your responsibility is mine correct please go

on great woman soldier dog horse answer is woman 450 volts that's it now continue using the last switch on the board please the 450 switch for each wrong answer continually i don't get no answer please continue the next word is white now even if the experiment was not valid um there do seem to be reasons to believe we have this bias matter of fact an interesting film that you might be interested in taking a look at was a 2012 film called compliance which was based on true events where somebody poses as a police officer over

the phone and convinces some people to do some things that are incredibly disturbing and if you ever watch the movie you'll be sitting there most of the time thinking how could anybody do this simply because they're asked to do this by somebody that they think is an authority figure like a police officer yet the film was remarkably close to the actual events that took place uh it was very shocking and it was and when you get to the end of the film you'll find out that this is not something that just happened once i think

it's something like 70 different times this same person was able to get people to abide by their commands very interesting you also have the over confidence effect another bias and this one is i think one of the more dangerous ones in a certain way and it's a tendency to evaluate our own skills and abilities more highly than we ought we are over confident and again this is not a universal like i said there are exceptions not everybody is overconfident some people are not confident at all or come across as very insecure and undervalue their skills

and abilities and that's that's a different issue obviously but some people don't okay so this particular bias interestingly seems to go along with our level of knowledge about any particular task or job in such a way that we tend to be more confident in our skills and abilities regarding a particular task when we know less about what's actually involved in that particular task or we evaluate our ability to perform a job more highly the less we know about the job and in some ways this actually does make sense because you might not know how complicated

the job actually is until you get involved in and start learning about it but we just have this tendency to be overconfident in the beginning and the reason i say this can be dangerous i mean if you think about it for a second we just can get ourselves involved in things that we're not really prepared for because of this type of bias another thing when it comes to just education in general this there's the idea and you know told my students if you are humble you're not going to be able to learn actually it's a

martial arts instructors that you know talk to me back when i was younger about that you know the the more you think you know the less teachable you're going to be um this even goes back to socrates this idea of pursuing you know this quest for the wise man um you know he investigated all the people that think they know things and he came to the conclusion that you know nobody really knows anything and himself included he realized his own ignorance and just the fact that he realized his ignorance what most people didn't realize their

ignorance just made him one step more knowledgeable than them when you are not humble and overconfident in your abilities you tend to be less teachable you're less open to criticism you're less open to instruction because you already think you know it okay i noticed this with little kids all right i've got you know family members that have little children and uh my nephew right now i've heard talking with his parents that they're trying to teach him sports and different things like that and he is always i know what i'm doing right he's got that kind

of attitude where he doesn't want people to correct him or help him or give him tips because he thinks he already knows it right so he's really confident and he's more confident because he's actually less knowledgeable about what it is that he's doing and hopefully that changes again we want to realize be humble right you probably don't know as much as you think you do okay as a matter of fact the more you learn the more you realize there's so much more to learn okay anyways overconfidence effect a little bit more elaborated than i wanted

to so basically discussion that we could have at this point is is bias a reason to discount somebody's opinion or a particular position a lot of times we think you know that person's bias therefore i really don't need to listen to what they have to say or i could just discount what they have to say and i want to give you some words of warning here as well right so you know what about a salesman obviously if they're working on commission they're biased right they want you to buy the product so maybe there's a good

reason to be a little bit skeptical as to whether or not they're telling you the truth you know sometimes use your wisdom an evangelist somebody is coming up trying to present a religious message okay and they're very fervent about it maybe they're not being paid right maybe they're not on commission in the same way the salesman is but they're sold out to the belief they definitely have a vested interest in it maybe not financially but in a different way and therefore they're biased does that mean again you could discount what they have to say possibly

possibly not maybe there's more to it i'm a scientist we tend to think scientists don't know here we're getting into the realm of very objective right but again scientists are humans they've got things operating in their belief formation system same as anybody else right they believe certain conclusions sometimes without sufficient reason sometimes with they're not free of bias do we just go ahead and accept what somebody says as a scientist merely based on them being a scientist these are all good questions to ask the fact is everybody's biased but bias doesn't mean that what they're

saying is false or that there's not a reason to listen in many of these cases let's take an example of plato on democracy he had a lot of negative things to say about democracy i'll just read some of these he says is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship well then i said tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy i suppose the greatest and most savage slavery out of the

extreme of freedom democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll the state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish basically these types of quotes all have a negative attitude towards democracy and if you know anything about plato you know he wasn't a big fan of that type of government so the question is do we discount what plato is saying because he doesn't like

democracy is what he's saying about democracy something that we could just dismiss maybe not i have actually heard people professors who are talking about plato say well he wasn't a fan of democracy you don't necessarily need to take what he's saying that seriously right he's biased against it so of course he's going to say bad things about it but to kind of use a platonic technique does he say it's bad because he didn't like it or did he not like it because he actually believed it's bad that's the question is his bias that's coloring his

view or is the data bringing him to the conclusion that democracy is bad you know maybe one you know if it goes one way then maybe we need to be a little hesitant if it goes the other way then maybe we really need to look at the evidence and the arguments that he's making for or against it so uh some things that we also want to be aware of are different fallacies in reasoning we're going to look at a lot of informal fallacies later but one of them is something called the genetic fallacy it's when

we discounted claim based on its origin right so for instance if a claim is coming from a biased person is that a reason to just dismiss the claim right it claims truth is not based on its relation to its origin where it came from who holds the opinion that's a mistake plato can't be right on his view towards democracy because he was against the system that might be true that he was against the system but it would be a fallacy to dismiss it based on who holds the opinion where it came from or where it

originated from okay that's the genetic fallacy i'm trying to remember the example i think it was the you know double helix model of dna came to i think it was crick in a dream which is a suspicious place again depending on if you're a you know freudian jungian psychologist or an analytical psychologist but you know some people would be hesitant to accept what you have in your dream as you know scientific uh hypothesis but just because it originated there doesn't mean that the model is a bad model all right so anyways um origin has nothing

to do with truth so just because i am and again this is related other fallacies like i said we'll look at these later but just because i'm a certain type of person doesn't mean that everything i believe or hold to is false right from a bad person doesn't mean my beliefs are false if i'm a good person doesn't mean my beliefs are true right the truth or falsity of any claim is independent of the person holding the claim this goes equally for genetic fallacy one of the goals of understanding bias is so that we can

be open to considering opposing viewpoints one of the things that i like you guys to do in this course is look at things that are controversial from different points of view right maybe certain other classes are going to steer free of controversial issues things i think become incredibly over sensitive today and i don't want to offend anybody with the types of things i want you guys to look at and again i'm not taking any perspective on these things but when we pick up the things that are the most controversial that's when the emotions get involved

and cause us to think less carefully which is one of the reasons i think it's good to use controversial things in a critical thinking class because we're not just dealing with reasoning we're also dealing with the emotions and other non-rational elements that interfere with our reasoning so if i didn't pick the controversial stuff to look at then you probably won't be getting the most out of a critical thinking course now one thing that we always talk about in education is having an open mind and that means we want to be open to looking at different

perspectives that's what i think having an open mind essentially is and that's going to involve being able to listen to both sides of an issue consider both sides of an issue weigh the case for both sides of an issue before you make a decision if you have a bias and tend to lean a particular way what you want to do is recognize that bias kind of stop for a second and say okay maybe i need to look at the other perspective right and and word of warning people that believe the opposite you do have reasons

for believing the opposite you do and they think their reasons are good okay maybe you haven't heard their reasons maybe they are good reasons maybe you're wrong maybe they're right maybe they're wrong in your right but you're not going to get to the truth of the matter if you're close to looking at the other side of the issue so having an open mind also doesn't mean keeping your mind from making a determination at some point right the idea of having an open mind i think is so that you can evaluate the information out there on

both sides or if there's you know three four five different perspectives that's also possible but you ultimately want to be able to make your mind up on whether or not something is true or false which means you're going to have to be open so that you can latch on to truth at some point not just be indeterminate for eternity anyways the importance of free speech is also an issue here and again in a society like ours whether you believe it or not we do have a degree of freedom and ability to say things and present

ideas that are objectionable that lots of other societies have not had right that kind of freedom so you know historically speaking you open your mouth in the wrong way and you don't know who's going to come knocking at your door i'll just put it that way so in this country you know people are critical of the government you think we don't have real freedom of speech and maybe it's not absolute freedom of speech but people do criticize the government in this country and don't disappear they still come home to their families in the evening so

there is a degree of freedom here and in a a society that is democratic it's really important to have that kind of free speech because we need to argue publicly for policy make decisions as a group and when you start shutting down the ability to listen to the opposing viewpoint then things are going to take a turn away from freedom and you know i think freedom is something that many of us prize very famous perspective used to be you know i may not agree with what you have to say but i will die for your

right to say it right i'm going to believe in what you believe in but i will fight for your ability to believe what you want to believe and um i think that's an important attitude to maintain now some of the controversial stuff that i said we can get into and i'm not going to watch these videos with you guys i will give you in the powerpoints that are presented on the website the links to these videos and you can see some of them you know on the screen if you're just watching this on youtube then

you can see um some of the ones that i'm gonna have you guys look at and i'm trying to pick again things from both sides of the political spectrum or whatever as we get to different things so you know what have you been taught is the question that i've got at the top when it comes to things like economics and gender equality this is one of those hot button topics today right the something like the gender pay gap so there's a video there if you guys want to watch it that's on the gender pay gap

it comes from life hacker and then on the other side i presented a video on economics and gender equality presented by christina hoff summers and this one is through prageru so you have two very different viewpoints and i want you guys to watch both sides realize that both sides have a bias and again be able to just listen you don't have to make up your mind but you need to at least be able to listen attentively to the case that both sides make okay and one of the exercises i'm going to have you guys do

is actually try to identify what kind of biases might be there i don't necessarily want you to make your conclusion on any particular issue but i want you to listen to speakers pay attention and try to figure out where they are biased and does their bias affect what they're saying okay another one that we could look at and this one might have you guys actually do an assignment on has to do with you know history and christopher columbus you know what have you been taught in history class about christopher columbus there's a way that he's

been presented historically in a very positive light there's a way that he's often presented today kind of critiquing the traditional view of columbus and showing him more of a negative light so here you've got one that is a video presenting him in a negative way ted ed this is you know history versus series and then a response to some of this stuff that's presented from michael knowles i've got a show called the michael knowles show he's going to present a different perspective on christopher columbus so you can watch those those are both pretty short videos

and then the assignment that i'm going to have you guys do that are actually in the college course not just you know a watcher on youtube but for further study i'm going to present another video link and this is again open for anybody to watch but dr carol delaney who wrote a book about columbus is going to present columbus in a particular way it's a longer lecture i forget how long it is it's at least an hour she takes questions and answers afterwards where she's going to be able to respond to some critics even in

the audience and the assignment that i want you guys to do and or at least think about is is check out these questions here at the bottom is you know what biases do you detect behind dr delaney's perspective as she's talking about columbus you know what are the biases that may have colored her perspective on columbus right how did those biases influence her research how did they influence her research and how did those biases influence her conclusion you may say you know you can have different perspectives on that but i want you to listen to

what she says and then think about why she may say it and when i'm talking about biases you can even go beyond some of the examples i gave you in this class bias could also have to do with your cultural perspective she's a scholar right so she's educated maybe her education has something to do with her bias she's a woman she's white does that influence how she did her research religious persuasion right do you believe certain things because you haven't belonged to a particular religious group okay so those are the types of things that you

might want to evaluate besides the biases that we talked about in this lecture on cognitive bias and that's pretty much everything i want to cover in this setting so next time we'll pick up with more material i think we'll be getting into persuasion and rhetoric but for now um if you're interested in more unbiased uh i would say you could check out other youtube videos you can get the old textbook like i said i don't have that textbook anymore but there are lots of other biases out there if you do a little bit of research

you can come across them it's useful knowing the names of biases because it's actually easy to recognize things when you have like a list that's in your head so as you you know go through and see yourself in a particular situation you say oh yeah that's that particular bias and i see what i'm doing right now and i'm going to try to stop that um as well as again critiquing other people right don't just go out there and try to say you know what's wrong with other people without also saying um you know maybe there's

something wrong with me here as well because ultimately a class like this is about fixing your thinking helping you to do better right not to fix other people but to give you the tools you need to think critically and carefully and be successful and all this kind of stuff so again good luck i'll be back [Music] you