How These Mental Mistakes Made The Pandemic Worse

Making decisions during the pandemic was difficult and exhausting. What are this restaurant’s mask policies? Is it crowded? Can I have people over for the holidays if they haven’t been vaccinated? Do my children need to wear a mask on the school bus? Do I need a booster shot? Do I need a second booster shot?

If the pandemic wasn’t stressful enough, having to confront so many high-stakes questions every day wore people out. Instead of thinking through decisions rationally and objectively, many people fell back on “heuristics,” little mental shortcuts used to make quick and rapid decisions. Most of the time heuristics work, but sometimes they don’t, and when they’re combined with faulty thinking caused by cognitive biases, people will fail to accurately perceive, process, or remember information.

In a pandemic, that can have deadly consequences.

What is cognitive bias?

There are more than 185 different types of cognitive bias, but some were more prevalent during the pandemic. Cognitive biases are mental mistakes that people make when making a decision or when confronting a situation. They can occur when someone on social media extrapolates information from the wrong source, or when your significant other thinks they know exactly what you are thinking. Cognitive biases are hard-wired into our brains and we have to mentally work to overcome them.

One of the most notable cognitive biases is confirmation bias, and it may have played a significant role in the public's perceptions of COVID vaccines.

Confirmation bias occurs when people only look for or consider information that supports their current beliefs and ideas. In the same vein, confirmation bias has people discount information that challenges their thinking or that might reveal erroneous beliefs or bad opinions. Some psychologists believe confirmation bias was a factor in people rejecting COVID vaccines.

For starters, there was already a substantial portion of the population that were skeptical about any and all vaccines. So when they heard about a potential side effect or health issue related to the shot, they interpreted that information—whether it was true or not—as “proof” that they were right to refuse the vaccine.

One aspect of the pandemic that fed into this was the absolute deluge of data people were exposed to on things like infection rates, hospitalizations, herd immunity, and how fast the virus was spreading. The sheer volume of data allowed skeptics to “cherry-pick” the data that supported their beliefs and to discount or ignore that information that did not. When hundreds of thousands of people are thinking this way during a pandemic, it can have devastating consequences for their families, neighbors and communities.

(It’s also a good argument for the expansion of data science education, so that more people can make sense of, and use of, the data they increasingly encounter in the world.)

What is the availability heuristic?

Another way our brains misled us during the pandemic was through the availability heuristic. This occurs when we judge the likelihood of something happening based on how easily information about it comes to mind. During the pandemic, when people made choices based on something they saw on Facebook that morning—rather than on overall trends or on advice from health experts—they fell victim to the availability heuristic.

For example, a parent who was on the fence about getting their child vaccinated might have seen a news report about a large number of parents who shared similar concerns and opted out. Because this news story supported their skepticism, it stays top of mind and is easily remembered, so when it comes time to decide whether or not to get their child vaccinated, the parent recalls the news story and opts out.

How Does Social Media Affect Cognitive Biases?

Unfortunately, the internet and social media enable a proliferation of misinformation, which also heavily plays on our pre-existing cognitive biases. In fact, both the availability heuristic and confirmation bias are often exacerbated by echo chambers—the closed, reinforcing networks people often create for themselves online. Search algorithms on our social media platforms are geared to prey on our confirmation bias because they are uniquely tailored to us and keep feeding us content similar to what we’ve viewed in the past. In fact, the algorithms behind platforms like Facebook and Google News are designed to learn about users from their clicks. The more users click on “clickbait” or share headlines from a certain news outlet or website, the more platforms push it into their news and social feeds.

These online echo chambers strengthen confirmation bias by isolating users from other points of view. Further, the more frequently users view similar headlines, the more available such information becomes, making them more susceptible to the availability heuristic.

How Do We Overcome Cognitive Biases?

While we may be vulnerable to our innate cognitive biases, we can better educate ourselves about our thinking and better understand when these errors in judgment occur. Improving how we analyze information, how we think logically, and ultimately draw conclusions will help us make better choices. In short, good critical thinking is key.

Good critical thinkers step back to reflect on their own thinking, taking time to plan, strategize, and reform their thinking when necessary. Critical thinking can be taught, and it needs to be learned. Intelligence can only take you so far, and smarts do not guarantee future well-being.

Anyone can be a better critical thinker if they:

Question assumptions: Ask basic questions about your beliefs. “What if” questions can be incredibly powerful for addressing assumptions. Also, don’t jump to conclusions and dig into the evidence and avoid biasing information.

Reason through logic: Critical thinking pushes you to get past the “spin.” Pay close attention to the “chain” of logic. Ask yourself: Is the argument supported at every point by evidence? Do all the pieces of evidence build on each other to produce a sound conclusion?

Seek out a diversity of thought and collaboration. It’s crucial to get outside the echo chamber. Challenge yourself to associate and converse with people you might not encounter in your typical day-to-day.

The pandemic years were challenging on every level, and they were made more so by our brain’s innate wiring. The key to overcoming cognitive biases is to educate ourselves about our thinking and better understand when and why errors in judgment occur.