10 Types of Faulty Thinking That Get Us in Trouble

We make decisions under the belief that we've weighed all of the risks and benefits carefully, but our judgments aren’t always as sound as we think. We misjudge the level of risk we’re taking all the time, especially when we’re under stress or don’t have enough information. One reason for these mistakes could be a set of thinking errors called cognitive distortions. Here's why this happens.

Risk and Judgment

How many people would choose a small prize that was a sure bet over a 50:50 chance at something far greater? How does the feel of those odds change when the value of each prize is moved higher or lower? Researchers at New York University and Peking University (Beijing) set out to analyze the different ways we judge risk and probability, and they found our perceptions of risk can vary greatly from person to person, sometimes in confusing ways. They published their findings in the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the article, we magnify and underestimate personal risk more than we realize, and for different reasons. One biggie is our own limitations. It might not come as a surprise that the less we know about a subject, the more we might misjudge its associated risks, but how much we misjudge them is where things get interesting. 

Consider the lifetime odds of dying in a car accident (1 in 608) versus the lifetime odds of dying in an airplane crash (1 in 11,175). Even knowing the odds, which mode of transportation would most of us feel safer taking? How many of us would take a car over an airplane if someone told us one of the two was doomed to crash? As much as most people would like to say they’d take the airplane, faulty judgment might still leave many of us crashing in the car.

Cognitive Distortion and Decision-Making

One way to explain our lapses in judgment could involve what experts call cognitive distortions. These mental blips often occur when people need to make decisions under stress or fall into knee-jerk reactions, but they can also reflect distorted core beliefs. There are 10 main variations, each affecting judgment from a different angle:

• Mindreading occurs when a person assumes someone else has negative thoughts about them. A person who’s mindreading might alter their risk-taking behaviors based on uninformed beliefs about others’ opinions.
• Catastrophizing is when someone becomes convinced of a negative outcome with little or no evidence to back it. Someone catastrophizing might refuse to get on a perfectly good airplane, certain it will crash.
• All-or-nothing thinking offers two extreme scenarios as the only possible outcomes. Someone suffering from this short-sighted view might vastly skew their perception of possible risks and the availability of solutions.
• Emotional reasoning causes decision-making based on emotions rather than facts.
• Labeling is a branding of attributes or limitations based on one isolated event. A good example would be to brand an airliner a “death trap” as the result of one crash landing.
• Mental filtering occurs when a person discounts the positive information about a subject and focuses only on the negative. People who insist flying is unsafe, despite reports stating otherwise, suffer from this cognitive distortion.
• Overgeneralization takes one event and assesses risk based on that one outcome. Similar to labeling, this thinking pattern takes a specific example and broadens its power to cover a wide and unrealistic umbrella.
• Personalization is the idea that someone’s presence alone in a situation might alter its outcome.
• “Should” statements cause people to act based on rigid expectations, usually self-imposed. Someone feeling pushed by what they “should” do might justify taking risks they might not normally take.
• Disqualifying the positive is a form of mental filtering that solely focuses on the negative evidence. This type of thinking creates a pessimistic view that could cause a refusal to take risks, even in the face of great reward.

We make rational decisions every day, but we also fall victim to distortions that can make faulty choices look sounder than they are. Seeing them from an inward view isn’t always so simple, but knowing these thinking errors exist is half the battle. Having a better understanding of our limitations might help us approach big or stressful decisions with greater perspective, or at least give us the insight to take a step back and more carefully consider our options.

Copyright 2020, Wellness.com