Biases exist because they speed up our thinking, but in many cases, that speed hurts us in the long term. As Kahneman characterized it, “The brain is a machine for jumping to conclusions.”

An incomplete list of personal biases that operate in daily, especially work, life:

• Overconfidence bias
• Expedience bias
• Experience bias
• [[Similarity bias]]
• Attribution bias
• Complexity bias

There are also biases that operate on a zoomed-out level, affecting all of Western thought:

“Progress, determinism, gradualism, and adaptationism.” …Determinism and adaptationism tell us that we are meant to be here and are well suited for survival; gradualism and progress tell us that change occurs in predictable ways. In short, these biases teach us that everything happens for a reason. - Lau

These biases persist because they are comforting, and they are comforting because they enable many existential inquiries to just stop. They are the enemies of critical thinking.

Troublingly for information architecture, categories almost always function as a way to jump to a conclusion. They’re biases dignified with structure.

References

Lau, Matthew. “Remeasuring Stephen Jay Gould.” Jacobin, 20 May 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/05/stephen-jay-gould-science-race-evolution-climate-change.