Cognitive biases part 2Tankeboksen

When labelling we jump to hasty, often negative conclusions about ourselves or others: ‘I am a fraud’, ‘he’s an idiot’, ‘he’s not interested’, ‘she is shallow’. Our brains use quick labelling skills to keep us safe from embarrassment, humiliation and danger, but often rob us of positive experiences.

We often use rigid demand cues like ‘you must’, ‘should’ or ‘could have’ in order to push ourselves forward. As long as we achieve our goals, demands can be good motivators. It is when we experience setbacks that demands can start affecting our self-esteem and leave us feeling overwhelmed rather than motivated.

Mental filtering is our tendency to focus on information that fits with our beliefs. How we filter information depends on both personality and mood. When feeling depressed we tend to see the world through a pessimistic filter that highlights deficits and blurs out opportunities.

The dismissing bias is when negative beliefs about ourselves make us doubt our own achievements, feel uncomfortable with compliments and rate others’ performances much higher than our own: “She only said that to make me feel better; she didn’t really like my work’, ‘I will never be as good as her’.

The hurdle measure bias is related to our interpretations of challenges, the effort it will take to overcome them, and our own abilities. The hurdle bias often leads to procrastination ‘I will do it later’ or talking ourselves out of trying ‘it is just too hard, I can’t do this’.

Personalisation is taking too much responsibility or blame for events that are not necessarily related to our actions. ‘My friend isn’t responding to my messages, I must have offended her in someway.’ ‘It is all my fault we lost today’.