10 cognitive biases that shape our world
It was the “Aha” moment. You know, that feeling when you really understand something or get an idea of how to solve a problem? Have you ever wondered what causes these moments? It’s your brain. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have. But it can also work in mysterious ways.
The behaviours are developed over time; they act like filters through which we see the world around us. But using these filters can make us lose touch with reality. They create holes in our perception of reality.
Example: A prominent study about people who experienced shark attacks was reported by the media, giving us the impression that sharks are extremely dangerous. In reality, there are far more deaths from bee stings and vending machines than from sharks! (You’re more likely to be attacked by a cow than by a shark.)
Being aware of our cognitive biases helps to recognize their power in shaping our thoughts, opinions, attitudes and the decisions we make. Let’s check out these effects by analyzing ten cognitive biases that shape our world today.
1. The Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic helps explain why tech companies are so eager to personalize their services for us. Netflix knows that we’ll find it easier to watch an episode of Money Heist if we see it sitting at the top of our recommendations list than if we have to search for it or scroll past other options first.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking fast and slow), Amos Tversky, and others have shown that people tend to use the ease with which they can think of examples when making decisions.
2. The Affect Heuristic
The Affect Heuristic is a cognitive bias that causes us to make snap judgments about a product or service based on an initial feeling.
In UX design, the affect heuristic gives us a powerful tool for crafting experiences that users will like. In many cases, this means focusing on appearance rather than function or content.
For example, imagine you’ve created an app that does something you’ve never seen before. It’s innovative, unique and useful. Unfortunately, you’re having trouble getting people to use it because they don’t understand why they should care.
Design changes that make the app look nicer will improve how people feel about it — and since they’ll make snap judgments based on those feelings, they’ll be more likely to use it without understanding what it actually does.
3 . The Anchoring Effect
One of the most common cognitive biases that UX designers can leverage is the Anchoring or Anchor-and-Adjustment Heuristic.
In UX design, this concept is used very often to influence users’ decision making and it works really well. Even though it’s deceiving, it’s completely legal since you’re not lying about anything but just using clever ways to get your customers to do what you want them to do.
Anchoring is the use of sale prices in retail stores. An item may normally sell for $100 and then be marked down to $60, which might seem like a bargain even though it’s still more than what an item like this would normally cost at another store.
4. The Endowment Effect
In UX, we may fall prey to the Endowment Effect by overvaluing our own product or service. We may not be willing to let go of features or aspects because we’ve invested time and energy into them, even though they don’t add real value or are possibly detrimental to design.
To overcome this cognitive bias, it’s important that we have a clear idea of who our users are and their needs. We can do this by creating personas and user journey maps so that our designs remain focused on solving the right problems. If a feature doesn’t contribute toward this goal, then maybe it’s time to say goodbye?
This phenomenon has been demonstrated in a number of experiments; one of the most well-known was conducted by Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler in 1990. They gave participants either a mug or a Swiss chocolate bar and asked them to estimate the value of the gift they received. The study found that the owners valued the gift twice as much as non-owners did.
5. Hindsight Bias
Hindsight bias is the tendency to think that an event was more obvious or predictable than it really was.
This is particularly relevant in UX, where we are constantly conducting user research, iterating designs and testing solutions. Hindsight bias can lead us to feel like we had everything figured out all along when we didn’t. It also makes us less likely to seek out information that has the potential to challenge our views.
In UX design, this bias can lead to an illusion of understanding, especially when it comes to evaluating and testing a final design. We may become convinced that we designed what users wanted, even if we did not actually validate the design direction.
6. The Sunk Cost Fallacy
You’re at the theatre. It’s an intermission, and you’re thinking about leaving the show of the worst film. But wait! You’ve already paid for the ticket. Doesn’t the money you’ve invested so far count for anything? Yes, it does. The money you’ve spent commits you to complete your investment by sitting through that horrible play.
It’s a bias that affects even the smartest people. And it affects us in ways we don’t even notice — like when we get stuck with a ticket to a terrible show or keep something (think of something you own that’s useless and dispose of :P) that isn’t working anymore because of all the money we put into it already.
One of my friends said,
I paid for a streaming service and most of the providers’ apps are slow and can’t handle high-definition videos, even though there are lots of other good providers. I’ve been sticking with them because they’re cheaper than the other options available.
6. The Halo Effect
The Halo Effect describes the phenomenon where people assume a person or thing is good in every way because of one good characteristic.
For example, if someone is attractive, you may assume they are successful, intelligent, funny and kind. You may rate their performance at work as better than it actually is, simply because they are attractive.
The Halo Effect was first described by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. Thorndike found that when military officers were asked to rate the performance of their subordinates, a soldier who scored highly for “intelligence” also scored highly for other qualities like “skill as a soldier” and “leadership ability” regardless of whether this was true.
7. Social proof
Social proof is a cognitive bias that causes us to see an action as more correct when others are doing it. Think about when you walk into a restaurant and it’s completely empty. Would you dare to eat there? Probably not, because you believe that if others deemed it unsafe or gross, then it must be so.
If a customer can’t physically see or touch an item, they rely on things they do know (like star ratings) to help them decide. That’s why Amazon uses a low-resolution image for its star ratings — it displays hundreds of stars on each page.
8. Dunning-Kruger effect
People suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect are so incompetent, that they don’t realize how incompetent they actually are. They have no idea that they don’t know anything.
The real trick to avoiding the Dunning-Kruger Effect is knowing your own limitations. If you aren’t good at something, admit it, and get someone who is good at it to help you with it. You might think you can do something on your own, but by doing so, you’re only hurting yourself and wasting time. So before attempting to do something yourself, stop and ask yourself whether or not you can do it well. Better yet, ask someone else what he or she thinks about your ability to do it well.
9. IKEA effect
The IKEA effect is that moment when you assemble a piece of furniture from a box and feel like you’ve just made something precious, despite the fact that it’s the same piece of furniture as everyone else bought from the same display rack in a warehouse. It’s when you put effort into making something and feel so much pride in the result that you value it more than if you had bought it already assembled.
There are many examples of the IKEA effect in UX design:
-creating a custom avatar for your profile
-adding a custom signature to your email
-customizing your blog layout
10. The scarcity effect
Don’t you hate it when you’re shopping for something and you see “limited time only” or “one day sale” signs all over the store? It's kind of like the sellers are trying to make us feel bad about ourselves because we’re not acting fast enough.
However, that’s just how the scarcity effect works: it makes people more likely to buy something when they think it’s about to run out or be taken away from them. So we’re going to talk about why this is a useful tool for you as a UX designer and how you can implement it in your own work.
First of all, while the scarcity effect might seem like an obvious thing, it can actually be used in a lot of different ways. For example, if you’re designing a messenger app, you can create scarcity by reminding your users that the person on the other end is online and waiting for a reply. Or if you’re designing an email marketing campaign, you could encourage customers to act fast with words like “act now!” and “this offer expires soon!”
Ultimately, what this means is that as a UX designer, you should keep in mind how long your users will have access to certain features of your product before they expire. If there’s something that
Hopefully, this will help us keep in mind that we are all subject to bias in some way or another. It is only when we recognize the biases that we can begin to make conscious decisions about what is best for us. We just have to be aware of them and recognize when such biases are influencing our perception or behaviour.
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