Think You’re Not Biased? Think Again.
To be completely clear: I am biased. You are biased. We are all biased. And these biases continue to shape our perceptions, decisions, and actions, often without us even realizing it. They sneak in our minds, influencing how we interpret the world and make choices — sometimes to our detriment.
Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in literature about biases. Each book reveals new layers of assumptions and misconceptions I didn’t even know I had. The more I learn, the more I see how deeply rooted these biases are in our thinking.
For instance, while reading How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, I was confronted with the planning fallacy — a cognitive bias where we underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions while overestimating the benefits. I always believed that meticulous planning was the key to success, but the authors argue that relying on detailed budgets and timelines can actually blind us to the realities of large-scale projects. This bias leads to consistently unrealistic forecasts and, ultimately, project failures.
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow exposed me to the anchoring effect, a bias where we rely too heavily on the first piece of information we encounter (the “anchor”) when making decisions. For example, if you first hear that a car costs $30,000, you might perceive a…
