Cognitive bias: Encyclopedia II - Cognitive bias - Overview

Cognitive bias - Overview

Bias arises from various life, loyalty and local risk and attention concerns that are difficult to separate or codify. They were first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as a foundation of behavioral economics. Tversky and Kahneman claim that they are at least partially the result of problem-solving using heuristics, including the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic.

Recently, some scientists (David Funder and Joachim Krueger) have raised doubt as to whether all of the 'biases' are in fact errors. Their theories hold that some so called 'biases' may in fact be 'approximation shortcuts', that aid humans in making predictions when information is in short supply. For example, the false consensus effect may be viewed as a reasonable estimation based on a single known data point, your own opinion, instead of a false belief that other people agree with you.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki