The human mind is wonderful and powerful, but it’s far from perfect. There are several common judgment errors that it’s prone to making. In the field of Psychology these are known as cognitive biases, or fallacies in reasoning. They happen to everyone regardless of age, sex, education or intelligence.
Over the past few months I’ve become fascinated by these biases and fallacies, so I’ve read several books about them. Today I want to share ten of them with you. They are the ones I repeatedly notice myself and those closest to me struggling with. My hope is that you will use the information in this article to pinpoint these destructive patterns in your own thinking, and break free from them before they send you spiraling down the wrong path.
- Negative self-fulfilling prophecies. – A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that motivates a person to take actions that cause the prediction to come true. This kind of thinking often tears relationships apart and causes people to fail at their goals. Here are two typical examples: 1.) A man believes that his relationship with his new girlfriend is “never going to last.” So he stops putting effort into the relationship, pulls away emotionally, and a month later the relationship fails. 2.) An intelligent undergraduate in the field of health convinces herself that she “doesn’t have what it takes” to become a doctor, so she therefore never completes the prerequisites for medical school, and thus never becomes a doctor.
- Only taking credit for positive outcomes. – This destructive thinking pattern occurs when we take full credit for our successes, but deny responsibility for our failures. A perfect example of this can be witnessed in school classrooms across the globe. When students receive a [Read more…]