2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
In this article, I want to describe the most common cognitive biases based on my experience. No, not psychotherapeutic, but everyday, I will draw from the everyday environment full-time and online.
What are cognitive biases?
Cognitive distortions are simply the ways our mind convinces us that something is actually wrong.
For example, a person might say to himself, “I always fail when I try to do something new. Therefore, I am a complete loser in everything I try. " This is an example of "black or white" (or polarized) thinking.
Cognitive biases are at the core of what many cognitive-behavioral and other types of psychotherapists try to help a person change through psychotherapeutic influence.
How it works?
To put it simply, by correctly identifying the distortion, the therapist helps the patient to respond negatively to reflections and subsequently learn to refute them. Refuting negative ideas over and over again, a person will gradually replace with more rational, balanced thinking, and the role of the therapist will “push”, work with resistance and help develop a new prism of the worldview.
In 1976, psychologist Aaron Beck first proposed the theory of cognitive biases, and in the 1980s David Burns was responsible for popularizing it with common examples of biases.
Let's move on to the most common of them:
1. Filtration
The person takes negative details and dispels them, filtering out all the positive aspects of the situation.
2. Polarized thinking (or "Black and White" thinking)
In polarized thinking, the vision of the world is seen through a "black and white" prism.
We have to be perfect or we are just failures - there is no middle ground. People with this kind of distortion often place people in “or” situations, without shades of gray or taking into account the complexity of most people and situations.
3. Overriding
In this cognitive bias, a person arrives at a general conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence.
If something bad happens only once, we expect it to happen over and over again. A person can see one unpleasant event as part of an endless picture of defeat.
4. Leap to conclusions
Without the participation of people, a person knows how people feel and why they do the way they do. In particular, this definition applies to how people relate to you.
For example, a person may conclude that someone is negative about him, but is not really trying to figure out if he is making the right conclusion. Another example is that a person can anticipate that things will go wrong and feel confident that the prediction is already an established fact.
5. Catastrophe
A person expects a catastrophe, no matter what. This is also called "exaggerating or minimizing".
For example, a person may exaggerate the importance of minor events (such as their mistake or other people's achievements). Or it may inappropriately scale down significant events.
6. Personalization
Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that whatever other people do or say is some kind of direct personal reaction to the person. The person also compares himself to others, trying to determine who is smarter, better looking, etc.
The person doing the personalization may also be the cause of some unhealthy external event for which he was not responsible. For example, “We were late for lunch and made the hostess reheat the food. If I had only made my husband move, this would not have happened."
7. Check errors
If a person feels controlled from the outside, he automatically considers himself a helpless victim of fate.
For example, "I can't change anything if the quality of my work is poor and my boss requires me to work overtime."
The fallacy of internal control suggests that we take responsibility for the pain and happiness of everyone around us. “Why aren't you happy? Is it because of what I did?”
8. Defeat of justice
The person feels hurt because they think they know what is fair, but other people disagree with them or don't fit into the concept. The most appropriate phrase here is: "Life is not always fair."
People who go through life, applying a measuring system against any situation, assessing its "fairness", will often feel bad and negative about it.
Because life isn't "fair" - things won't always work in your favor, even if you think they should.
9. The accusation
People tend to blame other people responsible for their pain, or take the other side and blame themselves for every problem. For example, "Don't sit next to me, it pisses me off, you make me feel bad!"
No one can "make" us feel differently - only we are in control of our own emotions and emotional reactions.
10. Should
A person has a list of hard-and-fast rules about how others and how they should behave. People who break the rules make a person angry, and he feels guilty when he breaks the rules himself.
For example, “I have to study. I shouldn't be so lazy. the action “should” is directed at oneself, the emotional consequence is the feeling of guilt. When a person makes statements of “should” to others, they often experience anger, frustration, and resentment.
11. Emotional reasoning
People think that the assumption should be true automatically.
"I can feel it, so it must be true."
12. Disappearance of changes
These are expectations that other people will change in accordance with the idea of them, that is, if you just click on them or coax them well enough or use manipulation. They need to change people, because the hopes for happiness completely depend on them.
An example, a frequent (similar) request: "What should I do with my wife, how to influence her so that I become happy and calm?"
13. Global labeling
In this distortion, a person summarizes one or two qualities in a negative global judgment. These are extreme forms of generalization and are also called "labeling" and "mislabelling". Instead of describing the error in the context of a specific situation, the person attaches an unhealthy label to himself. This includes describing the event in a vivid and emotionally rich language that has nothing to do with the truth.
For example, instead of saying that someone is taking their children to kindergarten every day, a person who mislabels may say that "she gives her children to strangers and does not know what they are doing there."
14. Inevitable reward from Heaven
A person expects his sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if someone would come and wave a magic wand. A person feels very bitter when the reward never comes.
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