Eight Common Psychological Preferences

Why are people so superstitious? Why do people sometimes ignore concrete evidence and allow themselves to be dragged into the impossible? How come a horoscope can sometimes be so accurate?

The human brain is both a creator and a receiver of stimuli, experiences, emotions and reasoning.

As the years go by, our brains create a solid foundation on which we build the psychological reality of our daily lives. In general, we depend on this foundation of understanding to steer us in the right direction in both our professional and private lives.

Sometimes our brain looks like a flawless machine, but a few parts are missing from this machine, which means that this brain sometimes makes mistakes. Some mistakes can be the result of overconfidence and others because of a lack of self-confidence.

Unlike errors that we can easily spot, such as errors in our perception (confusing things like colors, distance, speed, or depth), there are also errors that we are unable to comprehend. We are unable to see or feel these errors, so we cannot solve them.

Heuristic and Cognitive Preferences

A preference is essentially a bias. It refers to a deceptive, skewed or incorrect interpretation of reality that we ourselves create in our minds and consider logical. We do this by including only available information and excluding the rest.

Heuristic preferences are absolutely necessary to function well on a daily basis, but they can also be wrong and foolish at the same time. The idea is that as humans we are not willing to accept all the information we receive through our senses.

Processing, organizing, analyzing, and integrating information so that we can come back to it at a later time is a slow and exhausting process that can exhaust our mental resources.

So our mind uses shortcuts to make sure it doesn’t have to exert itself too much. This is one of the strategies our brains use and this strategy is as real as logical reasoning or the trial and error process.

Some known and unknown psychological preferences

In the world of psychology, several experiments have been conducted to determine whether such preferences really exist.

In recent years, some of the earlier experiments have been redone. These experiments have been able to confirm the existence of psychological preferences.

• Confirmation Preference: We choose and process the information that best fits our expectations and matches our existing ideas and preconceptions, whether this information is true or not. We are especially affected by this way of thinking when our emotions are involved. The affirmation bias also applies to situations where we feel the urge to protect our fundamental beliefs.

• Preference for self-justification: Sometimes we have to make decisions that are difficult to explain. This brain function ensures that we don’t torment ourselves too much because of these decisions or that we don’t blame ourselves too much when we make a mistake. We are always able to find reasons to justify ourselves, however questionable these reasons may be.
• Preference to look back: How many times have we thought: why didn’t I see this coming? These kinds of thoughts occur when something has already happened and we then look back at the situation and suddenly recognize all the signs that warned us of what was about to happen. This is a general feeling that is usually erroneously set up by looking to the past with the advantage of knowing now what will happen.
• Preference for ‘Sunk Cost’: This occurs when we are not willing to stop doing something that we have already invested time, money, effort or sometimes even dreams into. Even when there is enough evidence to tell us that what we want to achieve is impossible or unrealistic.

• The gambler’s fallacy: This preference stems from games of chance; bettors are often convinced that if you repeatedly land on the same suit or roll the same number, change is inevitable at some point. In reality, probability shows us that the first time there is as much probability as the next fifteen times.
• The Rule of Reciprocity: As humans, we tend to have a more positive view of the behavior of people who are part of our social circle or a particular group than those who do not belong to our group.
• Contagious acceptance: In this case, we think that contact or relationships with people who belong to a different ethnic group will be enough to reduce the prejudices about people who are different.

• The Forer or Barnum Effect: This kind of bias is especially important when looking at the influence a person’s horoscope can have. We value and value our horoscope with complete confidence in what it tells us, even when it actually uses general personality descriptions. We apply this horoscope specifically to our own lives, even when the descriptions are vague, imprecise and applicable to the lives of millions of people.

If you do not recognize yourself in any of these psychological preferences, then it is likely that you have been unconsciously seduced by another psychological preference, to the point of blinding yourself. That is,  you are only able to see the mistakes of others, but never your own.

Psychological preferences and heuristic tendencies are necessary and useful, although they can sometimes inevitably lead us down a path that is bitter rather than sweet.