Cognitive Biases: What They Are and How They Explain the Way Our Brain Works

Understanding what cognitive biases are is essential for navigating the world around us better and for designing new experiences.

Did you know that 95% of cognitive biases happen without us being aware?

They can be understood as shortcuts our brain uses to process the information around us.

Sometimes these shortcuts are not good and lead us to process information incorrectly, which we call judgment distortion.

Currently, more than 188 cognitive biases are known. These deviations or errors can appear in various forms. The most common ones are linked to information processing through shortcuts, distortion in how we store events in our memory, limitations in our brain's processing capacity, social influences, or emotional changes.

Understanding what cognitive biases are is important for us, designers, because we are constantly designing products and services in an era where "dark patterns" are increasing, cognitive load is also rising, and unconscious human error is growing. This is very concerning, especially in hospital environments where human lives can be put at risk.

How can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

Now I have an interesting "twist". Learning about cognitive biases is just as essential for better understanding the people who will use our products and services as it is for understanding our stakeholders!!

I would say that a large part of stakeholders make decisions based on the "bias" around them, which often leads us to poor choices when it comes to user experience and thinking more about business objectives than the real value we are delivering. One of those biases could be the Confirmation Bias.

We can therefore use cognitive biases to our advantage to better understand and persuade our stakeholders to make better decisions. At the same time, we can use this knowledge to recognize our own "biases", how to work around them, and logically design and create human-centered experiences.

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