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The Relationship between Cognitive Biases and Fallacies
Suppose your plane crashed in the middle of nowhere with you and a dozen other survivors. You have three options:
- Everyone leaves the crash site to look for food and help.
- Half of the group leaves the crash site to look for food and help, while the other half stays put.
- Everyone stays at the crash site.
What would you do?
This question was posed to me in a seminar. I felt certain that everyone should go look for food and help. I made my case to our group, and they ended up siding with me. But I was wrong, and so were they.
There was an expert in the room: a former US Air Force pilot. He explained that staying close to the plane was by far the best option for survival. His reasoning was that the search crew would have some idea of the plane’s last location by tracking the black box and smoke from the wreckage.
I had felt certain about my solution to this problem, but feeling certain doesn’t guarantee that your assessment is accurate. We humans have inherited many dispositions from our evolutionary past. Those dispositions include cognitive biases, and those biases can make us feel certain even when we’re wrong. In addition, they can trigger errors in reasoning-fallacies.
