According to the Biblical Genesis, God made man in his image and likeness; imago dei , what the Latin expression would say. Even so, no matter how well each strand of the nervous system came out and how well the navel remained at the center of its creation, I am very afraid that it left certain parts unfinished. Not the appendix or alopecia, I speak of those inexplicable defects that refer to the way we understand the world: cognitive biases .

To get on the ground, we can define, in broad strokes, a "cognitive bias" as that psychological effect that causes a distortion in the mental process, leading us to an inaccurate interpretation or judgment of reality . It is an apparent fallacy designed by our mind to cheat without raising suspicion and achieve an easy and fast result. Pure pragmatism, pure evolution.

An example would be the fact of remembering all the past as best, when at home they know that we had a very bad time in high school and that the eighties were a tacky suicide for our closet. This would be a kind of memory bias.

There are cognitive biases of all kinds and conditions, but today we will be left with the dumbest, some of them we have been able to rescue from the Anthroporama dissemination channel , dedicated to topics such as anthropology and psychology .

Name / Letter Bias

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, Ñ, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W, V, Y, Z.

Well, first of all, choose a letter ... I mean, a couple of letters.

Believe it or not, the human being, if they give him a choice, has a preference to opt for the letters that belong to his name, especially for the first one.

This is known as the name / letter effect and is part of a phenomenon known by some experts as implicit egocentrism , consisting of an "unconscious preference for things that relate to ourselves," as the popularist Patri Tezanos points out in her channel, Anthroporama .

This preference for the letters of our name not only works with our alphabet, it is also present in different cultures and in different alphabets and languages. It is also patent on any age or sex fork. Go ahead, try, try. Experiment with the first subject you find.

The Monte Carlo fallacy

We have seen it many times. Someone who then wins any game of chance and claims "to be on a roll . " However, the mind of this subject with such "good luck" is simply assigning behavior patterns to what are surely completely random events.

We have seen some of these misconceptions a thousand times, like that player who will continue to bet because he has won twice in a row and his head assures him that he will do it a third or the slot machine that one thinks is more likely to give the prize because he does not He has given it all afternoon.

It is serious, much unsuspecting palm paste betting because of its mistaken belief in this bias. Caution, player friend.

Cheerleader Effect

Everyone ended up hating the intense Ted Mosby , but how I met your mother we can still make something clear: the animating effect exists.

What seemed in principle a birth of immature Don Juan Barney Stinson ended up becoming an interesting fact of study. The character of Neil Patrick Harris said that when you visualize a group of girls, all of them may seem attractive just because they are together; However, if you see them separately you can change your opinion.

Well, according to research published in the journal Psychological Science , the flagship magazine of the Association for Psychological Science , yes, having a few friends around can improve the way our appearance is perceived.

This is due, according to scientists at the University of California , because our mind, for better or worse, tends to balance the qualities of the faces of a group. The most curious thing is that this effect is not only evident when we judge faces, but also when we do it with food dishes, works of art or buildings, for example.

Birthday Number Effect

This effect is very similar to the name / letter bias, just as we show a preference for the letters that make up our name, we also prefer the numbers that make up our birthday.

To bring to light and demonstrate this curiosity some researchers had an original experiment. In it they gave two groups of subjects to read a small biography of the Russian mystic Rasputin . In one of the groups the date was modified so that the celebrity's birthday coincided with that of the reader. And guess what?

The group of subjects who thought they were celebrating the same time as the emblematic Russian had a greater sympathy for him than the group without coincidence. And look that it is fun to love Rasputin after reading his vital adventures, his biography must be like the antipodes of our beloved Lady Di.

In experiments of cooperation between subjects this bias is also demonstrated, we collaborate and we become more friends with the partners with whom we have been told that they have the same birthday dates as we do.

It seems silly, but we do not even have to go far, other experiments indicate that if they show us a picture of a foreign being with a number equal to the date of our birthday we will also have some preference towards him.

How easy it is to hack the human mind. You just have to go in a group, choose the right letters and dates and make us feel on a roll to do what you want with us.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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