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How We Transmit Cognitive Biases to Our Children

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I am often faced with questions of how my family relationship is affected by my profession. See, I am a clinical psychologist with a clientele list of children and teenagers.

So my answer to this question is basically the same, it affects family relationship to a whole other depth and width that can't be explained in two minutes like a simple" hr and "how are you doing". But I could explain it to you should you have a day or two You can imagine the verbal and non-verbal answers I get.

Today I decided to share part of the psychologists' world in terms of thoughts regarding what we see but the common people fail to take note of. This is what is termed as cognitive biases.

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Deducting the first-hand example from my husband and me in regards to our children, I will start with the parent's behavior as directed to their children. From this explanation, I will show you bright relatable examples of the everyday sufferings of the cognitive biases in adults.

What is cognitive bias?

Rationality, which is driven by biases defines our character as humans. Therefore the systematic error in thinking that results in affected decisions and judgment that we as people make is what is referred to as cognitive bias. There are tons of well-written cognitive biases guides on the Internet, I’ll just help you to set the direction of researches and highlight the main points.

Cognitive biases are not all negative, some have that positive impact on you as people.

The cognitive biases that all parents suffer from

These illustrations are meant to help you understand cognitive biases and where desirable avoid it.

Clustering illusion as patterns is seen in random patterns. This leads you to think that when a baby sleeps undisturbed for like 2 hours straight the pattern will carry on from then henceforth despite history. Just because a certain pattern happened today in a life of a child, doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the new norm.

The pro-innovation bias that is shown in the overestimation of products usefulness because they are new and so shiny.

This basically means that the brand new products are prone to efficiency, reliability, and accuracy as compared to the older ones. We all know this is an assumption because sometimes old is gold.

Information bias comes in the sense that the more information we tend to be exposed to in terms of ideas and solutions, the harder it is to make a decision.

An example is based on the purchase of a baby cot. Your mother gives you your grandmother's cot which is scrutinized by the government health authorities as it is said to have lead in paint used which can expose your child to harm and worse death.

Your interior designer has a whole other idea, that the cot should match the design of the room and items of furniture. The sales people urge you to buy the latest technological cots given their advantages. What do you do? One word, get the baby cot you wanted to use in the first place.

Negative cognitive biases

These cognitive biases are widely noticeable in our everyday life in the society. I have tried to simplify the occurrences for the common people to understand.

- Recommendation received from closely related people in a product or service just because its function was a success to them.

- Collective behavior or crowd thoughts. These are situations that push us to do things just because it is in the trend or everyone else is doing it. For example, purchasing a newly released Apple product.

- If there is no part in the history of an event happening, then it fails to take root in the mind of the people. We as humans are obsessed with references or real life situations and this often leads to underestimation of severe situations.

Take current trends like cryptocurrency and blockchain, for instance. We underestimate the possibilities of losing our wealth when we are struck by disaster and at the same time often miss out on boom opportunities like digital assets. This is because it is developed in countries that have not experienced such.

- If digging deeper we lack the certainty and belief in cryptocurrency because they did not occur earlier which makes them unrealistic.

Conclusion

Given my thoughts based on my profession, I hope this bit of cognitive biases will serve you better. I hope it will be an eye-opener in consideration to all other life choices you will be faced with in future and as from now.

For the common people, it sometimes helps to think like psychologists in a way that will make decision making and judgment as sane and relatable as it can get.

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