Source: https://frodo2016.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/dd0ee-dilbert-confirmation-bias.gif
A Personal Bias
One bias I’ve noticed in myself for a while now is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a bias that affects your ability to consider other views or ideas once you’ve made your mind up about something, making it less likely that you will go back and make a reconsideration when confronted with new evidence or data. For example, let’s say I really preferred Intel products over AMD products. Due to confirmation bias, I’d be more inclined to notice and remember evidence that suggests that Intel is more superior, while simultaneously ignoring or possibly not even mentally registering evidence that suggests that AMD is better.
Detail Oriented or Big Picture?
I believe I am a more detail oriented person. I’ve noticed in myself that I have a tendency to fixate my focus on the smaller, finer details of a problem while trying to solve it, rather than looking at it as a whole. I’ve also noticed that I tend to break problems down into small components before methodically working through them, rather than considering the project as a whole while I work through it, which of course has its own advantages and disadvantages.
How has this interfered with my problem solving in the past?
Confirmation bias has affected me a number of times before. Quite often, I’ve found, that once I make a decision on how to best tackle a problem, I find it difficult to go back and reconsider how to solve the problem, even when I receive information on a better way to handle it. For example, a few months ago, I went to get into my car one day, but found that I had a flat tyre. At the time I was staying with my mother, whom lives about a ten-minute walk from a mechanics, so I decided to start walking there with my flat tyre (once I’d taken it off of course). However, after walking for a short time I remembered that my Mothers friend was visiting at the time and since he also had a car, I could have gone back and asked him if he could give me a ride to the mechanics. But confirmation bias set in, which caused me to keep walking instead of going back, because it caused me to overestimate the distance I’d already walked and trivialise the distance I had yet to walk, as well as overestimating how annoyed he might be to have to suddenly drive me to the mechanics, even though in hindsight he probably would’ve been happy to give me a ride there. As a result, even though I’d only been walking for a few minutes and could’ve easily walked back, I ended up carrying my tyre all the way to the mechanics when really I probably could have gotten a ride and saved myself a lot of hassle.
frodo2016 