Do Monsters Help Us Think?
Cognitive biases erupt when we take the reasoning processes, rules and tricks that work so well in one domain and apply them to another where they don’t fair so well. An interesting example is described by Robert Britt in his LiveScience article Monsters, Ghosts and Gods: Why We Believe.
A key point from the article:
“Brian Cronk, a professor of psychology at Missouri Western State University. “The human brain is always trying to determine why things happen, and when the reason is not clear, we tend to make up some pretty bizarre explanations.”
Although not called out as a bias, it clearly is. Monsters are a byproduct of our cognitive need to make sense of the world.
