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Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics.
Contents
- Decision making belief and behavioral biases
- Social biases
- Memory errors and biases
- Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases
- Individual differences in decision making biases
- Debiasing
- References
Although the reality of these biases is confirmed by replicable research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Some are effects of information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Such effects are called cognitive biases. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise, or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects can be present at the same time.
There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. However, this kind of confirmation bias has also been argued to be an example of social skill: a way to establish a connection with the other person.
Although this research overwhelmingly involves human subjects, some findings that demonstrate bias have been found in non-human animals as well. For example, hyperbolic discounting has been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.
Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases
Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general. They arise as a replicable result to a specific condition. When confronted with a specific situation, the deviation from what is normally expected can be characterized by:
Social biases
Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.
Memory errors and biases
In psychology and cognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:
Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases
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.
Debiasing
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.