Ask Lewis —9 Tips For Supporting The Objective Mind

Transcending cognitive biases

In my Zen practice, I often focus on being as objective as possible in my thinking and beliefs. Of course, this is difficult to do when I am constantly dealing with our internal cognitive biases.

I often read about cognitive biases and how they can influence us no matter how objective we try to be. Individual differences in cognitive bias have also been linked to varying levels of cognitive abilities and functions.

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been used to help understand the connection between cognitive biases and cognitive ability.

There have been inconclusive results when using the CRT for understandability. However, there does seem to be a correlation; those who gain a higher score on the CRT, have higher cognitive ability and rational-thinking skills.

This in turn helps predict the performance on cognitive bias and heuristic tests. Those with higher CRT scores tend to answer more correctly on different heuristic and cognitive bias tests and tasks.

Age is another individual difference that affects one’s ability to be susceptible to cognitive bias. Older individuals tend to be more susceptible to cognitive biases and have less cognitive flexibility. However, older individuals were able to decrease their suscept

These experiments had both young and older adults complete a framing task. Younger adults had more cognitive flexibility than older adults. Cognitive flexibility is linked to helping overcome preexisting biases.

Age? Age is another individual difference that affects one’s ability to be susceptible to cognitive bias. Older individuals tend to be more susceptible to cognitive biases and have less cognitive flexibility.

However, older individuals were able to decrease their susceptibility to cognitive biases throughout ongoing trials. These experiments had both young and older adults complete a framing task.

Younger adults had more cognitive flexibility than older adults. Cognitive flexibility is linked to helping overcome preexisting biases.

“Cognitive bias modification (CBM) is a new way to train your brain to think more positively and less negatively. It’s a bit like going to the gym for your mind. CBM works by helping you to identify and change the way you think about and interpret information. For example, if you have anxiety, you might tend to focus on negative thoughts and images. CBM can help you to train your brain to focus on more positive things.CBM can be used to treat a variety of mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, and addiction. It’s also been shown to be effective in improving mood and overall well-being in healthy people”

Mystic Flores

How Does One Eradicate All Cognitive Biases?

The easiest way is to compensate for cognitive biases is to practice critical thinking and apply scientific principles.

1. This involves being less sure of yourself and your beliefs.
2. Always question your ability to be objective and your ability to reason.
3. Practice skepticism. Be skeptical of your judgments. Don’t be too quick to judge something or someone.
4. Don’t cherry-pick.
5. Don’t practice wishful thinking.
6. Don’t draw extraordinary conclusions from limited evidence.
7. Don’t intentionally lead the evidence to a conclusion that you already believe to be true.
8. Learn about the many different cognitive biases.
9. Learn clever statistical methods to avoid or eliminate biases

Keep This in Mind

• The truth is often different, or more complex than what we imagine.
• There could be a vast amount of evidence that you have not even considered.
• Expand your knowledge by reading books. Whole books, not snippets.
• Instead of close-minded deductive reasoning, use more open-minded inductive reasoning.

Deductive reasoning: X and Y are true, so Z must also be true.

Inductive reasoning: X and Y appear to be true, so let us gather more data, and conduct a scientific experiment to see how probable it is that Z might be true.

• To develop a useful understanding we must defer to the explanations and findings of experts.
• The experts will apply scientific principles as far as is humanly possible.
• No single person can operate meaningfully in all fields of knowledge.
• The accumulation of knowledge is a collaboration involving all of humanity.
• Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t trust science.
• The most basic definition of science is “the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything”.
• Don’t trust anyone who is too sure of themselves.
• Science is fundamentally an exercise in questioning what you think you already know.

The success of scientific empiricism has taught us that the nature of the universe is conducive to scientific inquiry.

Here Are A Few Of The Cognitive Biases I Find Most Interesting And Why?

· The framing effect bias because it is very interesting — you can do all sorts of mass-scale mind games by framing things in specific ways, which is what the entirety of marketing and politics is predicated on.

· The bias blind spot. This is the tendency to not compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. It is interesting to me because it’s so meta, and this is valuable to me as an applied game theorist. Meta means ‘beyond’ or outside — it’s what people are usually doing in their games, rather than what they are doing inside this specific game the meta is what you expect your opponent to do this game, and what they expect you to do — the currently popular effective strategies and tactics and counter strategies

The bias blind spot is the bias that doesn’t recognize itself, permeating all the other biases, and in fact, proliferating them, all the while rendering the person completely oblivious or indifferent to their biases.

Add to this that there’s a sneaky, counterintuitive bias that lives in the bias blind spot, and in all biases for that matter — that bias is biased — or dare I say, unfair or inappropriate.

There are hidden assumptions inherent in this framing of bias (that bias is biased): it privileges purely rational thoughts and behaviors and (forced or imagined) fairness — which paradoxically, is unfair. These assumptions could serve as examples of bias blind spot, except they fail to register as biases, and thus are not and cannot be compensated for, or reconciled with reason.

Is Failure To Compensate For One’s Own Cognitive Biases A Bias?

Said another way, is the framing of purely logical thought as a necessary counter-measure to bias, or as being exempt from bias, actually unbiased? It seems to me it is just another manifestation of bias, galavanting as non-bias in the willfully ignorant.

And what of this ideal, this imaginary unbiased thought, or purely unbiased state? Can it exist? Should it? Who gets to say so? And how can it be achieved?

It seems to me any attempt to create a total lack of bias would create absolute bias. And that’s why I think bias blind spot is so interesting because as a concept, it is blind to itself all while substantiating and contradicting itself.

Here are a few of my other stories on biases:

Before you go…

I am Lewis Harrison, an award-winning author of over twenty books on personal growth and strategic thinking. For over a decade I was the producer and host of the show “What’s Up” on NPR-affiliated WIOX FM in New York.

Now, aside from writing on Medium, and connecting personally with my readers, I teach seminars and speak on personal development, and life strategies throughout the world.

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I want to acknowledge Bill Fryer, and Manny Cabrera. It was their posts in an online forum that motivated me to write this story.