Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enable faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics. Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.
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. Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue that cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance, and management.
Overview
Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These include
- information-processing shortcuts (heuristics)
- noisy information processing (distortions in the process of storage in and retrieval from memory)
- the brain's limited information processing capacity
- emotional and moral motivations
- social influence
The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972 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. Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic errors."
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". The "Linda Problem" illustrates the representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).
Participants were given a description of "Linda" that suggests Linda
might well be a feminist (e.g., she is said to be concerned about
discrimination and social justice issues). They were then asked whether
they thought Linda was more likely to be a "(a) bank teller" or a "(b)
bank teller and active in the feminist movement". A majority chose
answer (b). This error (mathematically, answer (b) cannot be more likely
than answer (a)) is an example of the "conjunction fallacy";
Tversky and Kahneman argued that respondents chose (b) because it
seemed more "representative" or typical of persons who might fit the
description of Linda. The representativeness heuristic may lead to
errors such as activating stereotypes and inaccurate judgments 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.
Nevertheless, experiments such as the "Linda problem" grew into
heuristics and biases research programs, which spread beyond academic
psychology into other disciplines including medicine and political
science.
Types
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 costs 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, 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, for example, the desire for a positive self-image leading to egocentric bias 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).
- 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).
- others give 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 accounts for the fact that many biases are self-serving or self-directed (e.g., illusion of asymmetric insight, self-serving 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 and the dot probe task.
Individuals' susceptibility to some types of cognitive biases can be measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) developed by Frederick (2005).
List
The following is a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Fundamental attribution error (FAE) | Also known as the correspondence bias is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours observed in others. At the same time, individuals under-emphasize the role and power of situational influences on the same behaviour. Jones and Harris' (1967) 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. |
| Priming bias | The tendency to be influenced by what someone else has said to create preconceived idea. |
| Confirmation bias | 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. 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). |
| Affinity bias | The tendency to be biased toward people like ourselves |
| Self-serving bias | 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 | 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 | 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.
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 belief revision (Bayesian conservatism), illusory correlations, illusory superiority (better-than-average effect) and worse-than-average effect, subadditivity effect, exaggerated expectation, overconfidence, and the hard–easy effect.
Practical significance
Many social institutions rely on individuals to make rational judgments.
The securities regulation regime largely assumes that all
investors act as perfectly rational persons. In truth, actual investors
face cognitive limitations from biases, heuristics, and framing effects.
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. However, they fail to do so in systematic, directional ways that are predictable.
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.
However, in some academic disciplines, the study of bias is very
popular. For instance, bias is a wide spread phenomenon and well
studied, because most decisions that concern the minds and hearts of
entrepreneurs are computationally intractable.
Reducing
Because they cause systematic errors, cognitive biases cannot be compensated for using a wisdom of the crowd technique of averaging answers from several people. Debiasing is the reduction of biases in judgment and decision making through incentives, nudges, and training. Cognitive bias mitigation and cognitive bias modification are forms of debiasing specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their effects. Reference class forecasting is a method for systematically debiasing estimates and decisions, based on what Daniel Kahneman has dubbed the outside view.
Similar to Gigerenzer (1996), Haselton et al. (2005) state the content and direction of cognitive biases are not "arbitrary" (p. 730).
Moreover, cognitive biases can be controlled. One debiasing technique
aims to decrease biases by encouraging individuals to use controlled
processing compared to automatic processing. In relation to reducing the FAE, monetary incentives and informing participants they will be held accountable for their attributions
have been linked to the increase of accurate attributions. Training has
also shown to reduce cognitive bias. Morewedge and colleagues (2015)
found that research participants exposed to one-shot training
interventions, such as educational videos and debiasing games that
taught mitigating strategies, exhibited significant reductions in their
commission of six cognitive biases immediately and up to 3 months later.
Cognitive bias modification
refers to the process of modifying cognitive biases in healthy people
and also refers to a growing area of psychological (non-pharmaceutical)
therapies for anxiety, depression and addiction called cognitive bias
modification therapy (CBMT). CBMT is sub-group of therapies within a
growing area of psychological therapies based on modifying cognitive
processes with or without accompanying medication and talk therapy,
sometimes referred to as applied cognitive processing therapies (ACPT).
Although cognitive bias modification can refer to modifying cognitive
processes in healthy individuals, CBMT is a growing area of
evidence-based psychological therapy, in which cognitive processes are
modified to relieve suffering from serious depression, anxiety, and addiction.
CBMT techniques are technology assisted therapies that are delivered
via a computer with or without clinician support. CBM combines evidence
and theory from the cognitive model of anxiety, cognitive neuroscience, and attentional models.
Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases
- Bounded rationality – limits on optimization and rationality
- Prospect theory
- Mental accounting
- Adaptive bias – basing decisions on limited information and biasing them based on the costs of being wrong
- Attribute substitution – making a complex, difficult judgment by unconsciously substituting it by an easier judgment
- Attribution theory
- Cognitive dissonance, and related:
- Heuristics in judgment and decision making, including:
- Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples
- Representativeness heuristic – judging probabilities on the basis of resemblance
- Affect heuristic – basing a decision on an emotional reaction rather than a calculation of risks and benefits
- Some theories of emotion such as:
- Introspection illusion
- Misinterpretations or misuse of statistics; innumeracy.
A 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggested that at least eight seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes noisy information processing during storage and retrieval of information in human memory.
Individual differences in decision making biases
People do appear to have stable individual differences in their susceptibility to decision biases such as overconfidence, temporal discounting, and bias blind spot.
That said, these stable levels of bias within individuals are possible
to change. Participants in experiments who watched training videos and
played debiasing games showed medium to large reductions both
immediately and up to three months later in the extent to which they
exhibited susceptibility to six cognitive biases: anchoring, bias blind spot, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, projection bias, and representativeness.
Criticisms
There are criticisms against theories of cognitive biases based on the fact that both sides in a debate often claim each other's thoughts to be in human nature
and the result of cognitive bias, while claiming their own viewpoint as
being the correct way to "overcome" cognitive bias. This is not due
simply to debate misconduct but is a more fundamental problem that stems
from psychology's making up of multiple opposed cognitive bias theories
that can be non-falsifiably used to explain away any viewpoint.
