How many of you here hold a belief that baldness is passed down from maternal grandfather?. The human brain is fairly complicated. Withal, people usually think that they understand themselves and overvalue the aptitude in solving sophisticated problems. People tend to acknowledge themselves as rational and logical, nevertheless, the mind likes to play a trick and creates twisted thinking. Therefore, the mind feels like under incantation names cognitive bias. The moment when we think that we know something is the moment that we do not know anything at all.
According to Annie Duke, in her book, Thinking in Bets, she mentioned that human brain evolved to generate order and certainty. Thus, when there is an idea of luck that affects the result of decisions, human tends to feel miserable and assume it as a random event that might not work the way they want. It would be better to fantasize that the world as a perfectly predictable place where luck and randomness do not interfere with things and penalize the plans.
We have to understand that when making a decision, we deal with many aspects such as uncertainty, risk, luck, rationality and irrationality. However, there is a price for every decision and sometimes it does not fit with what has been planned before although we have created a plan for every decision that we want to execute.
When it comes to establishing decision, human is not that great. Moreover, we usually connected our decision with result. Nevertheless, the decision does not work alone in breeding the result. Usually, people are trapped in self-serving bias and the bad thing about it is they do not know it and do not want to believe it. According to Healthline, self-serving bias is a concept of common habit that when a person takes credit for positive outcomes and condemns others for the negative result. However, there is always luck that interferes with the result whether it is a good or bad result, while we usually think that good result comes with good decision and bad decision yields bad result. Human brain is not evolved to be rational, therefore every decision that we make, mostly, irrational.
"Our lives are too short to collect enough data from our own experience to make it easy to dig down into decision quality from the small set of results we experience." - Annie Duke
Every bias obviates human to think rationally. Sadly, not all of us know and understand biases that we encounter or maybe we know some but we do not recapture them when we make our decision. It sounds impossible to remember and then apply all biases but at least we could try. Furthermore, self-awareness could be the first grand ability to understand ourselves and the way we think to generate decision. Admitting that we have bias and understanding what we do not know could foster learning from the event and acquiring knowledge faster. Annie Duke stated that claiming "I am not sure" does not show a bad reputation and it does not mean there is no objective truth. Always leave room for doubt because it will help to generate rational thinking before making decisions. Do not believe in everything we hear until we think and vet it further to determine whether it is true or false. Furthermore, it will establish ourselves to prepare for every possibility that will happen from the made decisions.
"The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that’s okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don’t perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try." - Annie Duke
In conclusion, the human brain tends to sink into the ocean of biases. Withal, they are often a result when the brain tries to simplify the information process. This is a common thing that happens to people since the brain does not evolve to be rational. Comprehending those biases that sometimes happen, could turn people to be the best version of themselves.
PS
If you want to read more about 50 cognitive biases in the modern world, try to click this link.