Groupthink7 is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people where individuals settle for a mediocre solution without evaluating alternative viewpoints. They mainly do this to minimize the conflicts within the group. My school teacher used to say “a student is a good person while students are not”.
Game theory
One of the popular theories of modern time comes from Game Theory, by John von Neumann and John Nash. It is basically process of figuring out outcomes when more than one rational player are involved.
Monty Hall problem is a classic example of its application. In the television show Let’s Make a Deal hosted by Monty Hall, you have 3 doors to choose, A, B, C, and behind 2 are goats and 1 contains a high end car. At the beginning of the show, you must pick a door (say A), which has a probability of 1/3 to be a car.
Now Monty, since he knows which door contains a car, would open another door (Say B) and show you a goat. Now you have two options, either to stick with A or to switch to C. You might think that the original probability remains same at 1/3 or 1/2 with the 2 options, but that’s not true. Switching to option C would increase the overall probability to 2/3. You might wonder why, but we need to take Monty’s behavior here, since he chose not to open option C instead chose B, that attracts more significance to option C. In other words, in a game where everyone tries to maximize his/her chances and is acting rational, we can predict the possible outcome. This theory was challenged by many but was found to hold true based on computer simulation.
Darren Brown, illusionist, in his Netflix show Pushed to the Edge, persuaded a member of public into almost committing a murder. We can be influenced by other people and environment.
Let’s look why we have such behaviors. We developed complex behaviors as we started to live in bigger groups. We needed to signal the group members of a specific need, language might not be sufficient all the time. A child’s cry indicates it needs some attention. This is a group behavior.
Let's see some popular social biases.
Conformity bias
This happens when we agree with social norms and commonly accepted behaviors rather than using our own personal judgement. Conformity bias is needed for cultural evolution to take place.
Confirmation bias
We all favor ideas that confirm our existing beliefs. We are cognitively lazy, we don’t link to change our knowledge structure and how we think about other things.
Dunning–Kruger effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly overrate their understanding of a certain topic. Let’s take the example of Game theory explained above. If you think you completely understand Game theory, then you have fallen into the trap. Game theory is complex, and it is still evolving, having applications in economics, evolution, social behavior.
It is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers. This bias comes from our inability to recognize our own ability. On an average8, men overestimate their abilities by 30% and women by 15%.
Bystander effect
Individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when surrounded by a group of people. The greater the number of people (bystanders) lesser the chance of offering help.
Framing bias
When we make varying decision based on different information of the same fact. Let’s take an example.
Here, the first option does a better job of framing the fact, people like that as it tries to show a positive thing.
Marketing depends on this bias to influence people.
Self serving bias
We attribute success to our knowledge and ability while failure to other people or factors outside ourselves. This way we try to protect our image in our community.
Availability Heuristic
We make judgements based only on the information available at hand. Let’s say you are driving, someone crosses into your lane without the proper signaling, and you immediately consider the person as a bad driver based on previous knowledge. But what you don’t have visibility is that the other person might be in an emergency situation and might need to reach a place quickly. So he/she might be a good driver, just not today.
Curse of knowledge and Hindsight bias
When we learn something new thing and get comfortable with it, then we assume others would know that as well. We sometimes fail to put ourselves into other shoes. For example, a brilliant teacher might not understand the difficulties faced by young students when teaching a new subject.