Do you ever question the impact your biases have on your actions, or better yet, are you aware of the powerful influence they have in your daily life? Many people including myself don’t question our actions most of the time unless it’s an important one, we just do it.
I have realised that all my decisions and behaviours are based on some type of bias, I just don’t actively point them out. I am fairly familiar with the concept of confirmation bias, this is when we selectively look for information that supports our beliefs and ideas. The way I like to look at it is to remember those days in school where I would receive an assignment asking me to answer what thought was an obvious question. Hence I would already have an answer in my head and would search for information supporting what I believed to be correct instead of going out of my way to look up information that went against it. That was only one example, but confirmation bias is present in many more ways.
Anchoring bias is something that is more new to me. I was introduced to it through a PowerPoint presentation by Yang Ao Wei. The idea behind anchoring bias is where the first thing you see will become your point of reference, you anchor onto it. Imagine you walk into a store wanting to buy a certain car, you see it priced at $26,000 and continue looking around. You see the same model but priced at $25,000 and decide to buy it since it is cheaper. However, the next day at a different store you see the same car model but for $23,000. You instinctively bought the $25,000 car because it was cheaper than the number you had anchored onto.
As you go about your day, maybe you’ll catch yourself being biased.
