Cognitive Biases

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a particular topic. I had attended a school in the Roman-Catholic School board and as part of the curriculum I was required to take religion course for my four years of high school. My grade twelve religion teacher was considered very conservative and did not like opinions that contradicted her own beliefs. We often had discussions about ethical issues like, Creation vs. Evolution which often lead to her ranting about how evolution is incorrect. Until one day when one of the biology teachers had a discussion about it in front of my class, the biology teacher had shown evidence supporting evolution while my religion teacher continued to protest, saying “that this is not verified, nothing in science is.” Her only source of evidence was the Bible. Her refusal of reading or even looking over the evidence supporting evolution lead to a huge problem between the two professors. I thought that this was just crazy because of her conformation bias she refused to acknowledge any evidence that contradicted her own. At the time I did not know what to do, but I have since realized that it is important to consider the opinions and evidence that contradicts ones own beliefs to further understand the complexity of the topic.

Hindsight Bias is described as overestimating ones own ability to predict any outcome that possibly could not have been predicted. Hindsight bias allows for us to move on, however it does not encourage us to learn from our mistakes. Often times when I am watching any television competition shows, I try to predict who the winner may be. I usually make my decision of who may win after the first round and root for that person, but most of the time someone else wins. Although I was rooting for person A and person B had won, I would play it off and act as though I always knew that person B would win. This is referred to as the hindsight bias. This is definitely not good and is a negative effect on my ability to problem solve. Sometimes I realize that I made a mistake but most of the time I do not, it’s most likely because I would like to feel as though I am correct about something, even though that was not even my selection of the winner.

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