Cognitive Bias: Our Craving to Judge

We all crave sugar.

Humans need sugar to live, so evolution gave us the craving for it. Sugar was relatively scarce in the environment in which humans evolved, so our metabolism adapted to convert excess calories from sugar quickly and efficiently into fat.

Fast forward 100,000 years: sugar is now abundant in our environment. But human metabolism hasn’t changed. It still quickly and efficiently converts sugar into fat. Since sugar is now abundant, people have gotten fatter and unhealthier.

Something analogous is true of human thought.

Humans need to survive and reproduce, so evolution gave us the desire for group membership. 100,000 years ago, we had many reasons to join a group: protecting ourselves from predators and competing tribes, finding food and other resources, finding potential mates, and so on. So our brains evolved tendencies to think, feel, and act in ways that enabled us to live successfully in groups. Those tendencies include filling in the blanks with guesses, making snap judgments, stereotyping people on character traits, seeking approval from our tribe, searching to support our existing beliefs, and wanting to be right.

Just like sugar cravings, we have these cognitive cravings because at one time they enabled members of our species to survive and successfully…