All Thinking Is Biased Thinking

Source: lightfieldstudios / @123RF

Have you ever been told you should change your attitude or that your thinking is biased in some way? Did you ever think something would turn out one way, but the result was the opposite? Perhaps your first meeting with a colleague was great, but they turned out not to be the person you thought.

Many times a day, we make judgments and decisions. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were trailblazers in this area of research. They gave people tasks and asked them to make decisions and judgments (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For example, they gave people descriptions of someone. Then the people had to choose that someone’s most likely job from a list such as pilot, farmer, or doctor. Or, based on a person’s attractiveness, they were asked how skilled the person might be. Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) is a delightful roam about this area.

From this work, patterns in our thinking called biases and heuristics were identified. For example, you can read about the confirmation bias and the availability heuristic. Heuristics seem like fun. There is a price heuristic, a brand name heuristic, a country-of-origin heuristic, an effort heuristic, a tallying heuristic, a nearest-neighbor heuristic, and even an outrage heuristic (Nadurak, 2025).

When you read about biases and heuristics, it can be helpful to keep in mind that what we know comes from observing and recording what people do in particular activities. And concluding that decisions are errors is based on the idea that people are rational decision-makers (Kahneman, 2011).

But are they?

What is missing from this field is the idea of people as controllers. Kahneman (2011) discusses how the mind works, but doesn’t refer to control. And while Kahneman (2011) and Nadurak (2025) both recognize the importance of goals, they don’t see them in a control process. Nadurak (2025), for example, cleverly points out that when people fail with one goal, maybe they are achieving another goal instead.

Goals are key to control (Powers, 2005). A goal is a demand for how some part of the world must be. A goal for body temperature to be 98.6 degrees F and a goal to catch the train to work are both instructions about aspects of the world. The first goal says how our body must feel, and the second goal sets a routine for moving from one place to another.

One of the important points about goals is that they are never on their own (Powers, 2005). The goal to catch the train to work might be feeding an “impress the boss” goal or a “get promoted” goal. It might also tweak goals like when to leave the house and where to get your morning coffee.

This immense web of goals explains all that we do. Every thought and idea we have come from our goals. This is why Nadurak (2025) was so shrewd to suggest that when we don’t achieve one goal, it might be that we’ve bagged another.

Everything we do is about controlling what we care about. And that involves an ongoing interplay between our inside and our outside.

The reason all this is important is because your thoughts arise from both your current situation and what you value. Of course, the things we value change. Goals change throughout our lives. Even so, any thought comes from how things are right now. Sometimes you might get a thought that intrigues you. Sometimes a thought might frighten you. Whatever the thought, it comes from you.

And here’s the big deal: If your life is going the way you want, keep doing what you’re doing. Stick to the goals on your radar. But if you’d like to improve something in your life, thinking about both your current situation and the goals you have might help. And the goals you bring to mind are only a teensy bit of all your goals.

Paying attention to the ideas that waft about in your head can help you learn more about you. Those vague inklings you barely notice can hold important clues to things you prize but are tucked away outside the spotlight of your attention. If you can grab them and play with them, maybe even talk out loud about them and notice what else tumbles into your mind, you might enjoy discovering more about the all of you.

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From what you learn, you could find yourself enjoying parts of you that were hidden. Even the scary or nasty parts have something to teach you. You put them in there for a reason. And those reasons are more goals that fuel some of what you might catch romping around inside. Do you have a sense yet of all that you could be? How do you feel about finding out?