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Cognitive Bias Mnemonics
How many cognitive biases can you name, off the top of your head?
Try it, before moving on.
Give yourself sixty seconds.
Make a list.
Write them down.
I know that I've read about a number of biases by now, but they don't come to mind very easily. If I wish to become wary enough to spot cognitive biases in my own thought, then I might appreciate being able to quickly summon many examples of cognitive biases to mind. This would also make it easier to share examples of cognitive biases with others.
I plan to create a set of mnemonics for important biases, to make it easier for myself to remember them (and, as a consequence, to make it easier to spot them and eliminate them). I'll imagine each bias as an item; by visualizing the collection of items, I can remember the biases. If I really want to make sure that I don't forget any, they could be placed along a path in a mind palace.
Example mnemonic: Hindsight bias is an old leather boot. It's an old leather boot because that reminds me of the past, which clues the name of the bias. And anyways, psshh, why is everyone so excited about the idea of footwear? Anyone could have come up with that! It's just like clothes, but for feet! I could have invented it myself, it's so obvious! Hindsight bias: it could happen to you.
Using various lists of cognitive biases, I'm going to be performing this exercise myself and making mnemonics to remember them by. I might post these at some point, but if you're interested in the outcome, I recommend trying to make mnemonics for yourself first -- the associations will be more meaningful to you, personally, that way.
But beware that conceptualizing a bias as a mnemonic might not be perfect, just like conceptualizing biases as named ideas might not be perfect -- more on that here.
For the comments: What witty mnemonics can you come up with?
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Comments (9)
You probably don't need to be able to make a full list of cognitive biases off the top of your head; rather, you need to have relevant memory about biases triggered whenever you encounter a situation where you are prone to them. As for training this, you can, say, open a list of biases at the end of the day, and figure out which biases you were affected by during the day, and try to remember those.
Of course, if you often want to tell others about cognitive biases, memorize a few of them with some good examples.
Exactly: recognition, much more than recall, is the desirable feat of memory here.
Tangential: I like the idea of having mnemonics for biases but that they can't be shared bugs me. I mean they could by publishing 'standard' mnemoncs but then they don't naturally fit in anybodys memory palace - at least not without additional mnemonic work.
So the idea is: Couldn't we have 'standardized memory palaces'? At least a few rooms which everybody shares. Kind of like a standard floorplan where everybody knows that the entrance (zero) with the stone floor (appeal to the stone) leads into the kitchen (1) with the sun-bathed flowers (halo effect) - or whatever. A memory palace everybody learns in kindergarten could be a great aid for communication and learning for everybody.
What do you think?
Woah, I like this idea.
I made a memory palace once; it contains a grand entrance hall, and within that entrance hall is a filing cabinet, and within that filling cabinet is a piece of paper with pictures about what I did on the day I made the memory palace. It's got remarkable fidelity, but it's useless unless I put something in it other than, well, that filing cabinet.
What would be a good way for us, as a group, to start creating a standardized memory palace? It would be cool to do this collaboratively somehow.
Hmm, this project might be of interest http://cci.mit.edu/deliberatoriumresearchpage.html Wad'ya think of it?
Huh, the screenshot reminds me of this thing that /r/hpmor ended up developing.
It might be a more valuable use of cognitive resources to recognize where bias in general comes from.
Rote memory tasks are good for trying to, say, guess the teacher's password. But it's a lot more efficient if you know what cognitive biases feel like and correct for that feeling ahead of time. In general, anytime something just feels right, you should trust but verify. Hindsight bias feels right when we look at things that already happened. Confirmation bias feels right when we see information that confirms what we already believe. Motivated skepticism feels right when we encounter information that challenges our beliefs. It feels wrong to argue against our ingroup.
As an example of what I mean: I knew a mathematics grad student for a while. Once I asked him (because I had forgotten) what the quadratic equation was. Surely, he's in grad school for math and memorized all of that stuff right? Wrong. He didn't know, but he did know how to derive it from (I'm guessing) certain principles in math. He re-figured it out and showed it to me.
Should we? Is it not enough to remember about confirmation bias and so rather make a habit of stopping, evaluating whether your first reaction starts with 'yes, of course' and consciously trying to think 'no, because'? Your system might have the advantage of play, though.
How many european kings can you name, off the top of your head?