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A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences of other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.^[1] Individuals create their own “subjective social reality” from their perception of the input ^[2] (p. 2). An individual’s construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate one’s behaviour in the social world.^[3] Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.^[4][5][6]

Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context (e.g. Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996).^[7] Furthermore, cognitive biases enable faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics.^[8] Other cognitive biases are a “by-product” of human processing limitations,^[9] resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.^[10]

A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Cognitive biases are important to study because “systematic errors” highlight the “psychological processes that underlie perception and judgement” (Tversky & Kahneman,1999, p. 582). Moreover, Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment.^[11]

Overview [edit]

Daniel Kahneman

Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These include information-processing shortcuts (heuristics),^[12] mental noise and the mind's limited information processing capacity,^[13] emotional and moral motivations,^[14] or social influence.^[15]

The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972^[16] and grew out of their experience of people's innumeracy, or inability to reason intuitively with the greater orders of magnitude. Tversky, Kahneman and colleagues demonstrated several replicable ways in which human judgments and decisions differ from rational choice theory. Tversky and Kahneman explained human differences in judgement and decision making in terms of heuristics. Heuristics involve mental shortcuts which provide swift estimates about the possibility of uncertain occurrences (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010, p. 141). Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce “severe and systematic errors” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, p. 1125).^[17]

For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as the tendency to “judge the frequency or likelihood” of an occurrence by the extent of which the event “resembles the typical case” (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010, p. 141). The “Linda Problem” illustrates the representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983^[18] ). Participants were given a description of the target person Linda which implies Linda could be a feminist, as she is interested in discrimination and social justice issues (see Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). Participants are asked whether they think Linda is a “a) bank teller” or a “b) bank teller and active in the feminist movement”. Participants often select option “b)”. Tversky and Kahneman (1983) termed participants choice as a “conjunction fallacy”; whereby participants chose option b) because the description relates to feminism. Moreover, the representativeness heuristic may lead to errors such as activating stereotypes and inaccurate judgements of others (Haselton et al., 2005, p. 726).

Alternatively, critics of Kahneman and Tversky such as Gerd Gigerenzer argue that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or the probability calculus.^[19] Nevertheless, experiments such as the “Linda problem” grew into the heuristics and biases research program which spread beyond academic psychology into other disciplines including medicine and political science.

Types of cognitive biases [edit]

Biases can be distinguished on a number of dimensions. For example, there are biases specific to groups (such as the risky shift) as well as biases at the individual level.

Some biases affect decision-making, where the desirability of options has to be considered (e.g., Sunk Cost fallacy). Others such as Illusory correlation affect judgment of how likely something is, or of whether one thing is the cause of another. A distinctive class of biases affect memory,^[20] such as consistency bias (remembering one's past attitudes and behavior as more similar to one's present attitudes).

Some biases reflect a subject's motivation,^[21] for example, the desire for a positive self-image leading to Egocentric bias^[22] and the avoidance of unpleasant cognitive dissonance. Other biases are due to the particular way the brain perceives, forms memories and makes judgments. This distinction is sometimes described as "Hot cognition" versus "Cold Cognition", as motivated reasoning can involve a state of arousal.

Among the "cold" biases, some are due to ignoring relevant information (e.g. Neglect of probability), whereas some involve a decision or judgement being affected by irrelevant information (for example the Framing effect where the same problem receives different responses depending on how it is described; or the distinction bias where choices presented together have different outcomes than those presented separately) or giving excessive weight to an unimportant but salient feature of the problem (e.g., Anchoring).

The fact that some biases reflect motivation, and in particular the motivation to have positive attitudes to oneself^[22] accounts for the fact that many biases are self-serving or self-directed (e.g. Illusion of asymmetric insight, Self-serving bias, Projection bias). There are also biases in how subjects evaluate in-groups or out-groups; evaluating in-groups as more diverse and "better" in many respects, even when those groups are arbitrarily-defined (Ingroup bias, Outgroup homogeneity bias).

Some cognitive biases belong to the subgroup of attentional biases which refer to the paying of increased attention to certain stimuli. It has been shown, for example, that people addicted to alcohol and other drugs pay more attention to drug-related stimuli. Common psychological tests to measure those biases are the Stroop Task^[23][24] and the Dot Probe Task.

The following is a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases:

• The Fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as the correspondence bias (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours observed in others. At the same time, individuals under-emphasizie the role and power of situational influences on the same behaviour. Jones and Harris’ (1967)^[25] classic study illustrates the FAE. Despite being made aware that the target’s speech direction (pro-Castro/anti-Castro) was assigned to the writer, participants ignored the situational pressures and attributed pro-Castro attitudes to the writer when the speech represented such attitudes.
• The Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. In addition, individuals may discredit information that does not support their views.^[26] The confirmation bias is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance. Whereby, individuals may reduce inconsistency by searching for information which re-confirms their views (Jermias, 2001, p. 146).^[27]
• Self-serving bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
• Belief bias is when one's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.
• Framing by using a too-narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.
• Hindsight bias, sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.

A 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggests that at least 8 seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism.^[28] It is shown that noisy deviations in the memory-based information processes that convert objective evidence (observations) into subjective estimates (decisions) can produce regressive conservatism, the conservatism (Bayesian), illusory correlations, better-than-average effect and worse-than-average effect, subadditivity effect, exaggerated expectation, overconfidence, and the hard–easy effect.

Practical significance [edit]

Many social institutions rely on individuals to make rational judgments. A fair jury trial, for example, requires that the jury ignore irrelevant features of the case, weigh the relevant features appropriately, consider different possibilities open-mindedly and resist fallacies such as appeal to emotion. The various biases demonstrated in these psychological experiments suggest that people will frequently fail to do all these things.^[29] However, they fail to do so in systematic, directional ways that are predictable.^[30]

Cognitive biases are also related to the persistence of superstition, to large social issues such as prejudice, and they also work as a hindrance in the acceptance of scientific non-intuitive knowledge by the public.^[31]

Reducing cognitive bias [edit]

Similar to Gigerenzer (1996),^[32] Haselton et al. (2005) state the content and direction of cognitive biases are not “arbitrary” (p. 730).^[9] Moreover, cognitive biases can be controlled. Debiasing is a technique which aims to decrease biases by encouraging individuals to use controlled processing compared to automatic processing (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010, p. 155).^[33] In relation to reducing the FAE, monetary incentives^[34] and informing participants they will be held accountable for their attributions ^[35] have been linked to the increase of accurate attributions.

See also [edit]

	Psychology portal
	Thinking portal

References [edit]

Further reading [edit]

• Eiser, J.R. and Joop van der Pligt (1988) Attitudes and Decisions London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-01112-9
• Fine, Cordelia (2006) A Mind of its Own: How your brain distorts and deceives Cambridge, UK: Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-678-2
• Gilovich, Thomas (1993). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-911706-2
• Haselton, M.G., Nettle, D. & Andrews, P.W. (2005). The evolution of cognitive bias. In D.M. Buss (Ed.), Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, (pp. 724–746). Hoboken: Wiley. Full text
• Heuer, Richards J. Jr. (1999) Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Central Intelligence Agency. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/psych-intel/art5.html
• Kahneman D., Slovic P., and Tversky, A. (Eds.) (1982) Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press ISBN 978-0-521-28414-1
• Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 978-0-374-27563-1
• Kida, Thomas (2006) Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking New York: Prometheus. ISBN 978-1-59102-408-8
• Nisbett, R., and Ross, L. (1980) Human Inference: Strategies and shortcomings of human judgement. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall ISBN 978-0-13-445130-5
• Piatelli-Palmarini, Massimo (1994) Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-15962-X
• Stanovich, Keith (2009). What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12385-2. Lay summary (21 November 2010). 
• Sutherland, Stuart (2007) Irrationality: The Enemy Within Second Edition (First Edition 1994) Pinter & Martin. ISBN 978-1-905177-07-3
• Tavris, Carol and Elliot Aronson (2007) Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Books. ISBN 978-0-15-101098-1
• Funder, David C.; Joachim I. Krueger (June 2004). "Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (3): 313–376. PMID 15736870. Retrieved 3 May 2011. 

External links [edit]

• The Roots of Consciousness: To Err Is human
• Cognitive bias in the financial arena
• A Visual Study Guide To Cognitive Biases