Self-regulation is a personal skill that refers to an individual’s ability to assess and manage his reactions to feelings, strong emotions, such as excitement, frustration, embarrassment, or anger, and environmental factors for behavior control.
System-1 refers to quick, reactive, instinctive, and holistic thinking that relies on salient memories and situational cues for time-sensitive decision-making and confident judgment, especially in the case of familiar situations. An example of system-1’s use in my personal life is the detection of a person’s sadness based on his or her voice. In this case, my efficient judgment (a person is sad) is based on situational cues (a voice’s tone) and salient memory (this tone indicated sadness in the past).
System-2 refers to analytical, reflective, procedural, and deliberative thinking used for planning and the analysis of abstract concepts, especially in an unfamiliar situation. An example of system-2’s use in my work life is answering politely to an irritated customer trying to figure out the rationale of his complaint. While a natural reaction may be aggression in return, efficient outcomes require the analysis of the whole situation, reflection, and the prediction of another response’s consequences, such as job termination.
Heuristics is an individual’s general cognitive shortcuts used daily for decision-making based on either reactive or reflective thinking depending on the situation which frequently leads to biases. There are seventeen types of cognitive heuristics, including satisfying, temporizing, affect, simulation, availability, representation, association, stereotyping, “us vs them,” power differential, anchoring with adjustment, the illusion of control, optimistic bias, hindsight bias, elimination by aspect, loss and risk aversion, and “all or nothing” (Facione & Gittens, 2016). An example of heuristics from my personal life is making judgments related to unfamiliar people based on features associated with others. For instance, once I had a highly negative attitude toward a woman I had never seen before and met for the first time. The reason was that she had the same perfume used by my ex-friend who had betrayed me. Thus, I made a wrong judgment based on an association without knowing a person.
Dominance structuring is the psychological process or a strategy of decision-making in which a person attains confidence in his or her choice by assessing the merits of every option and excluding less beneficial ones. In general, dominance may be regarded as a positive attribute of critical thinking as it allows one to make the most appropriate decision. First of all, this decision is made not spontaneously but based on critical thinking, analysis of the current situation, and previous experience. In this case, dominance structuring allows one to assess risks and avoid errors.
A cognitive bias refers to a systematic error that occurs in thinking based on an illogical and continuous misinterpretation of information along with ignorance of its important aspects. System 1 allows a person to think faster, however, it does not presuppose the analysis of available data for reasonable decision-making. In this case, the cognitive bias appears when new information is associated with an already existing and perceived one without paying attention to the context that may provide a unique experience. In addition, in system-1, cognitive bias occurs due to the ignorance of information that does not support a hypothesis or validate a reasoning mode. Thus, to avoid bias, facts and all aspects of information should be considered.
Reference
Facione, P., & Gittens, C. A. (2016). Think critically (3rd ed.). Pearson Education.