Cognitive Biases

Types of Cognitive Biases

I.Tendencies that Affect Thinking in General. A.Confirmation Bias B.Belief Bias C.Hindsight Bias II.Heuristic Biases A.Representativeness B.Availability C.Anchoring III.Self-Defensive Biases A.Cognitive Dissonance B.Attribution Biases 1)Fundamental Attribution Error 2)Group Attribution Error 3)Actor-Observer Bias 4)Self-Serving Bias IV.Miscellaneous Biases A.The Gambler's Fallacy B.The Halo Effect C.The Overconfidence Effect D.System Justification E.Negativity Bias F.Implicit Bias

Countering Cognitive Dissonance

•Review the initial action and your reasons for taking it. •Admit mistakes instead of rationalizing past actions.

Countering Confirmation Bias

•Talk with people who have different views. •Consider what evidence would count against your view. •Shift your focus from proving you're right to "getting it right." •This tactic includes and requires separating facts from opinions, including your opinion.

What are cognitive biases?

•Psychological tendencies that interfere with objectivity. •Similar to Bacon's Idols of the Mind, mostly Tribe and Cave. •Understanding these tendencies, thus, involves both psychology and logic.

Miscellaneous Biases

A.The Gambler's Fallacy: The belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, then it will happen less frequently in the future. •Example: You lost the last 10 hands of Black Jack, so you believe that you'll win the next 10. B.The Halo Effect: When one's overall impression of a person's character influences what one thinks and feels about more specific character traits of that person. •Example: John is a really nice guy, so he must be smart, too! C.The Overconfidence Effect: Systematically overestimating one's own knowledge and ability to predict. Example: In surveys, 84 percent of French men estimate that they're above average lovers

Miscellaneous Biases (2)

D.System Justification: States that, 1)People have a general tendency to justify the existing social order. 2)This tendency is at least partially responsible for the internalization of inferiority among members of disadvantaged groups. 3)It typically operates below the level of conscious awareness. 4)Ironically, it is sometimes strongest among those who are most harmed by the status quo. •Example: During the Women's Rights movement, much opposition to the movement came from women.

Miscellaneous Biases (3)

E.Implicit Bias: Attitudes or stereotypes that, in an unconscious manner, affect our understanding, actions, and decisions. •Example: Race-based discrimination still seems to occur; i.e., white applicants typically get 50% more call-backs than black applicants. ● F.Negativity Bias: The way that negative experiences tend to exert a greater psychological impact on an individual than positive experiences of the same magnitude. •Example: When someone remembers an insult levied at him/her for decades, despite the fact that the individual responsible apologized.

What is heuristic?

•A heuristic is a strategy for making a fast decision, a mental shortcut or a "rule of thumb" for getting an answer quickly and efficiently. • Often, they can lead to good answers, but they can also lead to cognitive biases.

Stereotypes and Representatives

•A stereotype is a conception of the features common to members of a group. •The stereotype of a bird, for example, is an animal that flies and is fairly small compared with most mammals. •A robin is a stereotypical bird; a penguin is not. •A stereotype goes beyond the definition of the group, which must be true of every member; it includes features that are common but not universal to that group.

Anchoring

•Anchoring is the tendency to estimate a quantity by starting with a reference point (the anchor) and moving away from the anchor insufficiently. •Example (1): If you are buying a used car, the salesperson offers a price that sets an anchor; and many of us, in making a counteroffer, do not adjust far enough down—we don't ask for the lowest price the dealer would accept. The same pattern applies to buying a house and to other purchases where the price is negotiable. •Example (2): Restaurants with high-priced entrees. Very few people will order those meals, but they set an anchor that makes the lower-priced meals seem like a bargain.

Availability and Memory

•Availability is a factor that can distort one's memory in many ways. •Dramatic events reported by the media: In addition to airplane crashes, events such as shark sightings, campus rallies that turn violent, and child abductions are all dramatic and make the news, but they are extremely rare. •Personal Experiences: Events and experiences in our own lives that have strong feelings attached are more easily recalled than other, more routine, experiences. A breakup in a relationship, for example, is easier to recall than the many happy dates and conversations along the way. The salience of the breakup makes it easier to recall, and so can bias your judgment about relationships. •Repetition: "Repeat something long enough and people will believe it." When we hear a statement repeatedly, it becomes more familiar than something we hear for the first time; it comes to mind more readily, and thereby seems more credible. Repetition is another way the availability heuristic can lead to bias. •Availability Cascade: A special form of repetition that expands in a "chain reaction." A cascade typically begins with an event that catches public attention when it is reported—an oil spill, for example, or a mass shooting. The report spawns public concern, which leads to more coverage, which leads to more concern, and so on.

Availability Heuristic

•Availability is the tendency to estimate the frequency or likelihood of an event on the basis of how quickly instances or associations come to mind. •For example, if we are asked whether cars or planes are the safer mode of transportation, we might say cars. Airplane crashes come to mind easily because they are dramatic, widely reported events, whereas car accidents are less memorable. •Plane crashes are more available to memory than traffic fatalities, and that can easily influence a judgment about relative risks. •The problem here is that the information most available to memory is not necessarily a reliable guide to actual base rates. In this case, the base rate used by most transportation experts is deaths and injuries per mile traveled. By that measure, planes are much safer.

Belief Bias

•Belief Bias is the tendency to let agreement or disagreement with a conclusion affect one's evaluation of the validity or strength of the argument for that conclusion. •Like confirmation bias, in belief bias we let our preexisting beliefs affect our assessment of the evidence for or against them. •BUT there IS a difference: •Confirmation bias is the tendency to look only for positive evidence and to ignore or discount contrary evidence. •Belief bias is an error in evaluating the evidence we have; it is not a matter of gathering evidence but of assessing whether and to what extent the evidence, stated as premises, supports the conclusion of an argument

Countering Other General Biases

•Belief Bias: Be clear about the difference between a)The plausibility of the premises and conclusion of an argument (whether they are factually correct) and, b)The internal degree of support the premises would confer on the conclusion (or, whether the argument is valid, structurally correct). •Hindsight Bias: Consider how other outcomes of a decision or event would have been possible.

Forms of Cognitive Dissonance

•Buyer's Remorse: Suppose that you buy a new car and eventually your excitement for the purchase fades. Before your purchase, you focused only on the positive traits of the car, but now it is the reverse. This condition causes a mental conflict that you might resolve by exaggerating the defects of the other cars and magnifying the benefits of your current car. •Attitude Changes: Some experiments are designed to create cognitive dissonance to assess whether subjects will change their view. For example, imagine if you are asked to write an essay defending a position that goes against your beliefs. If you are assigned such a topic, you are not likely to change your mind. However, if the experimenter allows you to volunteer to write such an essay, you are more likely to change your view to resolve the mental conflict. •A Foot in the Door: Salespeople, political campaigners, and others who want us to take an action often start small, to get a foot in the door. A campaigner might ask a voter to put a small sign for the candidate in his yard. If the voter agrees, then to avoid cognitive dissonance that small action leads him to strengthen his support for the candidate, and thus to become more amenable to requests for money, and then to volunteer, in an upward spiral of commitment to maintain consistency

Confirmation Bias

•Confirmation Bias is the tendency to look for and take account of evidence supporting a conclusion, assumption, or hypothesis; while ignoring, downplaying, or failing to seek evidence against it. There are several examples. •Most common form - Arguments between people holding different opinions; neither side considers evidence for the opposing side, such as in court cases. •Magnifying personal traits and stereotypes and paying attention only to behaviors that confirm them (in fact, creating categories of "kinds" of people). •Looking for trends and patterns and generalizing on that basis; sometimes generalizations happen too quickly. •Self-confirming worries - Such as when a hypochondriac sees minor pain as a symptom of a severe illness, or when a paranoid person sees every misfortune as evidence of a conspiracy. •Relying on biased information sources

Countering Heuristic Biases

•Countering Representativeness: Consider base rates in dealing with stereotypes. •Countering Availability: Seek information beyond what is immediately available from memory to estimate event frequencies. •Countering Anchoring: Consider a different anchor, ways you might justify the opposite point of view or course of action. •Take the outside view, putting the particular details of an issue in a wider context.

Attribution biases

•Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to overemphasize personal (internal) characteristics and ignore situational (external) factors when judging a person's behavior. •Example: I judge the person who cut me off as a jerk and an unsafe driver, but unbeknownst to me, he had to rush his sick wife to the hospital. •Actor-Observer Bias: The tendency to underemphasize internal factors and overemphasize external factors when judging one's own actions. (In other words, the fundamental attribution error tends to occur when we judge others, but the opposite tends to happen when we judge ourselves.) •Example: He failed the test because he's a bad student. But I failed the test because my dad made me help him with yardwork the night before. •Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to attribute our successes to our personal traits, such as ability, and our failures to external circumstances. •Whereas actor-observer bias is more of a cognitive shortcut, the goal of self-serving bias is to preserve one's self-esteem. •False Consensus: The tendency to see our own actions and beliefs as the normal, rational response to the circumstances at hand. Those who respond in the way we do confirm that view. (Very similar to Bacon's Idols of the Cave). • Group Attribution Error: The assumption that decisions made by a group are representative of the feelings of all members of that group.

Hindsight Bias

•Hindsight Bias arises from the limitations of memory. Specifically, it occurs when one's knowledge of the outcome of an event distorts one's view of the sequence leading up to that outcome. •This distortion usually takes one of the following forms: 1)"I knew it all along." 2)"It had to happen. 3)"I should have predicted it."

Countering Attribution Biases

•How another person's action might have been a response to his circumstances. •How your own traits might have affected your response to the circumstances in which you acted. •Whether another person might have acted differently in the same circumstances.

What is Attribution?

•In psychology, the term "attribution" refers to the judgments we make to interpret the causes or reasons for peoples' behavior—both our own actions and those of others. •The main distinction in psychological research on attribution is between internal and external factors. •Internal factors are traits of the person, including beliefs, goals, personality, and character. •External factors are things about the circumstances in which the person acts. •Example: Why did the teacher give you a low grade? •Answer (1): Because she doesn't like you. [Attributed to internal factors] •Answer (2): Because you scored low on the final exam. [Attributed to external factors •Attribution biases are errors in attributing internal and external factors to explain behavior.

The Representative Heuristic

•The representativeness heuristic is the tendency to estimate the probability that a thing or event belongs to a class primarily by the similarity of the thing or event to the stereotype of that class—without taking sufficient account of other relevant evidence such as base rates. •For example, judging that a penguin can fly because it is a "bird." •Classic Experiment: The profile of Jack, by Kahneman and Tversky (See the notes below).

Cognitive dissonance

•tendency to experience discomfort at the discrepancy between one's actions and one's standards and to eliminate the discomfort via non-rational means.