Anchoring Bias | Cognitive Biases Series

Hey there everybody, and welcome back to this presentation on anchoring biases. This is another part of our Cognitive Biases series. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In general, the anchoring biases is the tendency to rely too heavily on one aspect of a situation or piece of information when making decisions. You usually this is the first piece of information acquired on the particular subject. There are several different anchoring biases. The first one we'll talk about is the common source or common method bias. This means using research or information from only one source or sources that are very similar or use the same methods. Examples News My mother used to work for the Associated Press as well as Gannett News Service. Others out there include Reuters. These are organizations that compile news stories and then they send them out, they disseminate them to newspapers and television stations all over the country. So you may be thinking that you're getting independent news when you look at ABC News in Kansas versus CBS News in Atlanta. But they may be getting all of their news stories or the majority of their news stories from a central aggregating organization, for example, if you call it that. So it's important to recognize that you may be getting fed the same information from different news outlets. They may be getting their information from the same place. You may be using information that is gotten from the same perspective. For example, the US Only. So people who only get their information from researchers in the US or from news sources in the US Maybe missing big perspectives. When I look at treatment protocols and how to address particular mental health issues, yes, of course I look at what the US National Institute of Mental Health, for example, says on it. But I also look at other countries and how do they what are their best practices for treating this particular issue? Because I want multiple perspectives to inform my decision. Your own friends and colleagues well, we tend to be in sort of a mental vacuum sometimes when we are communicating with our own friends and colleagues because they share, they often share similar perceptions to us and they get their information from similar places as we do. So they may be contributing to that anchoring bias because we're not getting contradictory or differently informed input. So what are the solutions? Seek multiple sources, even contradictory ones. If you are in a relationship, for example, and you think it is just the greatest relationship ever, and your friends are like, hey, yeah, that's the greatest relationship ever. Well, that's, that's great. But what does your pastor say? What does your therapist say, for example? Maybe they have a different perspective on what's going on. And this applies more toward to things like news and current events than it may may apply to relationships. And look for the confounding variable. This is what I do when I read research studies all the time. Because it's impossible, especially when dealing with humans, to account for every possible variable that could be contributing to a particular situation or scenario that could be potentially causing depression or cancer or particular viruses, or making people susceptible. So it's important to look and say, hmm, I wonder what else could be causing this? Or what else could be contributing to this besides what is being spelled out for me right here? Conservatism or insufficient revision is another bias that we often encounter. Examples could be expecting people in current relationships to behave like people in old relationships, or despite having several successes, still seeing oneself as a failure. What we've got here is a refusal, if you will, to let go of old premises, old beliefs, even in the face of contradictory information. If we're in a relationship with somebody who is just, you know, the cat's meow and treats us really well, and it's a very healthy relationship if we still have a part of us that is looking for scanning and expecting them to behave like other people did in other relationships, that may be the conservatism or insufficient revision bias because we've, we're still part of us is still expecting them to fulfill that, that old belief, even though we have all this information to the contrary. There's a quote from a movie series that I like called Jesse Stone and the movie comes or the quote comes from the movie Jesse Stone Lost in Paradise. If you don't like the answers you're getting, check the premises. If you keep getting answers that just don't seem to fit, step back and examine whether you're considering all of the factors that examine whether you're using outdated information to make current decisions. Remember to examine situations based on the facts in the present context and the current validity of prior beliefs. Just because we get new information doesn't necessarily mean our old beliefs don't have some validity to them. But we need to evaluate how valid are they now. You know, beliefs that I held when I was 8 years old are pretty for the most part invalid now that I am 50 years old. Another bias is called functional or role fixation. And this is when we see things as needing to be used only how they're supposed to be used, or, or seeing people being in roles and only doing certain very well defined things in their roles. And this really keeps us stuck in a box where we're not able to think creatively or adapt efficiently. Examples. And I love working on this cognitive bias in some of my classes because it's a fun activity. I give people duct tape, paper clips, mosquito netting, and I ask them, what could you do with this? And I encourage them to get past what the thing was originally made for. For example, taping ducts or clipping papers together. What else could you use it for? Get outside the box. Be creative. The same is true for roles. You know, we often think of people as being in particular roles and it's very narrow in what we expect them to do or how we expect them to act. The solution to this is what I've termed the MacGyver principle or creative problem solving. For example, back oh gosh, 10 years ago, maybe the car was something that got you from point A to point B and that's all it was. And then comes Uber and people started figuring out that, hey, my car can also be something that I can use to make money. So that gets out of that role fixation. Seeing the car is just a way to transport me from point A to point B. Art therapy Using clay pots to process emotions There are a lot of art therapy activities that you can do with clay pots, not just planting plants in them. Balloons or bubbles are only for parties. But that's not true. Balloons are great things that you can use that typically aren't going to break lamps and stuff. If it's a rainy day outside and the kids have a lot of energy or the dogs have a lot of energy, blowing up balloons and tossing them around can be a way to get out energy. It's not just something to look at, to use for a decoration. Bubbles. Blowing bubbles is something that we do at parties as well, but it can also be a great activity, especially for kids, but. But for adults too. To encourage slower breathing and trigger that rest and digest response. To tame the HPA axis, blowing bubbles requires us to breathe in a big breath. We hold it for a second, we get the bubble stuff in place, and then we exhale slowly and that actually calms our stress response down. And computers or iPads, typically we think of them as a way to process information, write papers, send emails, do things like that. But during the pandemic, we also started seeing them as ways to visit other people. Yes, we're not visiting in person, but sometimes we couldn't. So through an iPad or, or through a computer, we were able to virtually visit people and still get that face to face sort of engagement, even though we weren't able to be there in an actual person. And the law of instrument. Reliance on only tools or methods currently known. And this also leads us to stuckness, or inability to get outside of the box. For example, math. A lot of times when you do math, you're taught there's only one right way to do this. And I can tell you after homeschooling my kids, there are multiple different ways to go about solving equations and still get the right answer. So relying only on one particular method to solve a problem may prevent you from seeing other ways to solve the particular problem. Anger management and addiction are two other examples. Reliance on only what you know for addiction. If you know 12 steps is the way to go. Well, what if 12 steps doesn't work? Then what do you do for anger management? Cognitive behavioral therapy. What if cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't seem to work for this person? Do you just keep applying it and thinking, hey, if I apply it enough, maybe it'll work? No, that is a fallacy, and I'm not sure exactly who said it. There's a lot of argument about who was the first to say that. The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting different results. So the law of instrument encourages us to step back. If we try doing something with a method that is known and it doesn't work, then look for other methods. Emotional regulation and interpersonal communication are two other examples. If we only use the skills and tools that we currently have, we may not be effective at regulating our emotions or communicating with other people. So we need to break this law of instrument and be willing to explore new strategies. Be willing to consider that there might be other instruments out there, other tools that actually work better, and be willing to search for them, ask for them. The anchoring bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one aspect of a situation or piece of information when making decisions. Usually this aspect is the first thing we noticed, or this piece of information is the first piece of information we got, and we just take it to be the whole thing, when in reality it may only be a part of what's actually happening or only one way to solve a particular problem. This causes us to fail to notice improvements in behavior. If we rely on only the first thing that we saw, then we don't see improvements as they happen. It may cause us to fail to notice differences among people. If we base our assumptions on how one person acts and assume that everybody's going to act that way, or rely on faulty or incomplete data, all of these can contribute to increased feelings of depression, helplessness and hopelessness, anger and anxiety. Use those strategies to combat the anchoring bias. Step back. Get creative. Get outside of the box. Ask yourself regularly. Even if you think you know everything about a particular topic, step back and ask yourself, what am I missing? What else could there be? What are some other perspectives? In order to make sure that you're seeing the whole picture.