Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness". Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying ...

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Behavioral finance and behavioral economics are closely related fields which apply scientific research on human and social cognitive and emotional biases to better understand economic decisions and how they affect market prices, returns and the allocation of resources. The fields are primarily concerned with the rationality, or lack thereof, of economic agents. Behavioral models typically integrate ins ...

Including:

• Behavioral finance - History
• Behavioral finance - Methodology
• Behavioral finance - Key observations
• Behavioral finance - Behavioral finance topics
• Behavioral finance - Behavioral finance models
• Behavioral finance - Criticisms of behavioral finance
• Behavioral finance - Behavioral economics topics
• Behavioral finance - Criticisms of behavioral economics
• Behavioral finance - Key figures
• Behavioral finance - Non-specialists whose work is important to the field

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Cognitive science has much to its credit. Among other accomplishments, it has given rise to models of human cognitive bias and risk perception, and has been influential in the development of behavioral finance, part of economics. It has also given rise to a new theory of the philosophy of mathematics, and many theories of artificial intelligence, persuasion and coercion. It has made its presence firmly known in philosophy of language and epistemology - a modern revival of rationalism - as well as cons ...

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Cognitive science, Cognitive science - History, Cognitive science - Principles of Cognitive Science, Cognitive science - Approaches, Cognitive science - Levels of analysis, Cognitive science - Interdisciplinary nature, Cognitive science - Cognitive science - The term, Cognitive science - Scope of cognitive science, Cognitive science - Artificial intelligence, Cognitive science - Attention, Cognitive science - Language processing, Cognitive science - Learning and development, Cognitive science - Memory, Cognitive science - Perception and action, Cognitive science - Research methods, Cognitive science - Behavioral experiments, Cognitive science - Brain imaging, Cognitive science - Computational modeling, Cognitive science - Neurobiological methods, Cognitive science - Key findings, Cognitive science - Notable researchers in cognitive science and related fields

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Within the framework of skepticism, critical thinking is the process of acquiring information and evaluating it to reach a well-justified conclusion or answer. Part of critical thinking comprises informal logic. Increasingly, based on research in cognitive psychology, educators believe that schools should focus more on teaching their students critical thinking skills than on memorizing facts by rote-learning. The process of critical thinking responds to many subjects and situations, finding connections between them. It is, therefore, ...

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Critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overview, Critical thinking - Methods of critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overcoming bias, Critical thinking - Reaching a conclusion

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One might refer, for example, to the systemic, systematic, or institutional bias of a particular institution in devaluing contributions by women or ethnic minorities. For example, a poetry competition that was consistently won by white men could be subject to suspicion of a bias if there was no inherent reason that white men would consistently be the best poets. Such a bias could be deliberate on the part of the participants or entirely unconscious. For example, the poetry contest might be judged by a pool drawn from its own previous ...

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Systemic bias, Systemic bias - Bias in human institutions, Systemic bias - Systemic versus systematic bias

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There is some contention over the choice of the word systemic as opposed to systematic. When it is used to contrast with random error, in that it is not just a matter of inaccurate results or readings, but results that are persistently inaccurate in a particular way, then the more common usage is systematic bias or systematic error. Some users of the phrase try to draw a distinction between systemic and systematic corresponding to that between unplanned and planned, or to that between arising from the chara ...

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Systemic bias, Systemic bias - Bias in human institutions, Systemic bias - Systemic versus systematic bias

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Perception Attention and Filter theories (the ability to focus mental effort on specific stimuli while excluding other stimuli from consideration) Pattern recognition (the ability to correctly interpret ambiguous sensory information) Object recognition Categorization Category induction and acquisition Categorical judgement and classification Category representation and structure Memory Short-term memory and long-term me ...

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Cognitive psychology, Cognitive psychology - Major research areas in cognitive psychology, Cognitive psychology - Famous and/or influential cognitive psychologists, Cognitive psychology - Related lists

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The sort of mental processes described as cognitive or cognitive processes are largely influenced by research which has successfully used this paradigm in the past. Consequently this description tends to apply to processes such as memory, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery. Traditionally emotion was not thought of as a cognitive process. This division is now regarded as largely artificial, and much research is currently being undertaken to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion; research also includes one's awareness ...

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Cognition, Cognition - Cognition in mainstream psychology, Cognition - Influence and influences, Cognition - Cognitive ontology, Cognition - Cognition as compression, Cognition - Cognition as a social process, Cognition - Cognition in a cultural context, Cognition - Example of emergent organization, Cognition - Summary, Cognition - Related fields

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In one study by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper, pro-Palestinian students and pro-Israeli students at Stanford University were shown the same news filmstrips pertaining to the then-recent Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Lebanese militia fighters in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. On a number of objective measures, both sides found that these identical news clips were slanted in favor of the other side. Pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israel references and fewer favorable reference ...

See also:

Hostile media effect, Hostile media effect - Overview, Hostile media effect - Psychology, Hostile media effect - Media

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Within the framework of skepticism, the process of critical thinking involves acquiring information and evaluating it to reach a well-justified conclusion or answer. Part of critical thinking comprises informal logic. Given research in cognitive psychology, educators increasingly believe that schools should focus more on teaching their students critical thinking skills than on memorizing facts by rote-learning. The process of critical thinking responds to many subjects and situations, finding connections between them. It forms, theref ...

See also:

Critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overview, Critical thinking - Methods of critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overcoming bias, Critical thinking - Reaching a conclusion, Critical thinking - Critical thinking in the classroom, Critical thinking - Quotation

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An epistemological paradigm shift was called a scientific revolution by epistemologist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which ...

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Paradigm shift, Paradigm shift - Kuhnian Paradigm Shifts, Paradigm shift - Examples of paradigm shifts in science, Paradigm shift - Other Uses

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On an individual being level, these questions are studied by the separate fields above, but are also more integrated into cognitive ontology of various kinds. This challenges the older linguistically-dependent views of ontology, wherein one could debate being, perceiving, and doing, with no cognizance of innate human limits, varying human lifeways, and loyalties that may let a being "know" something (see qua ...

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Cognition, Cognition - Cognition in mainstream psychology, Cognition - Influence and influences, Cognition - Cognitive ontology, Cognition - Cognition as compression, Cognition - Cognition as a social process, Cognition - Cognition in a cultural context, Cognition - Example of emergent organization, Cognition - Summary, Cognition - Related fields

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Critical thinking has a useful sequence to follow: Itemize opinion(s) from all relevant sides of an issue and collect Logical argument(s) supporting each. Break the arguments into their constituent statements and draw out various additional implication(s) from these statements. Examine these statements and implications for internal contradictions. Locate opposing claims between the various arguments and assign relative weights to opposing claims. Increase the weighting when the clai ...

See also:

Critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overview, Critical thinking - Methods of critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overcoming bias, Critical thinking - Reaching a conclusion

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In multiple observations, some dating back to antiquity, language acquisition in human children, fails to emerge unless the children are exposed to language. Thus 'language acquisition' is an example of an 'emergent behavior', which in fact requires a narrow, yet evolutionarily reliably occurring, set of inputs. In this case, the individual is made up of a set of mechanisms 'expecting' such input form the social world. In education, for instance, which has the explicit task in society of developing child cognition, choices are made re ...

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Cognition, Cognition - Cognition in mainstream psychology, Cognition - Influence and influences, Cognition - Cognitive ontology, Cognition - Cognition as compression, Cognition - Cognition as a social process, Cognition - Cognition in a cultural context, Cognition - Example of emergent organization, Cognition - Summary, Cognition - Related fields

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Recently a great deal of attention has been paid to another class of stupidity: stupid actions by those that are highly educated and worldly. It is an important subject as it is increasingly evident that powerful, and generally very intelligent, people sometimes do stupid things. In recent years a number of notions such as groupthink have been developed to explain this. This is a fairly new topic for researchers and there are still few academic works on the subject, though in the 19th Cent ...

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Stupidity, Stupidity - Definitions, Stupidity - Stupidity manifested by the educated, Stupidity - Stupidity in comedy, Stupidity - Pretending stupidity as a sales tactic, Stupidity - Individual stupidity vs collective stupidity, Stupidity - Quotes

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One famous image, Earthrise, taken during Apollo 8, the first Apollo mission to the Moon, shows planet Earth in a single photograph. Earthrise is now the icon for Earth Day, which did not arise until after the image became widespread. At this level, an example of an 'emergent behavior' might be concern for Spaceship Earth, as encouraged by the development of orbiting space observatories etc. Other concepts which seem to have arisen only recently (in the last century) include increased expectations for human rights ...

See also:

Cognition, Cognition - Cognition in mainstream psychology, Cognition - Influence and influences, Cognition - Cognitive ontology, Cognition - Cognition as compression, Cognition - Cognition as a social process, Cognition - Cognition in a cultural context, Cognition - Example of emergent organization, Cognition - Summary, Cognition - Related fields

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Critical thinking has a useful sequence to follow: Itemize opinion(s) from all relevant sides of an issue and collect Logical argument(s) supporting each. Break the arguments into their constituent statements and draw out various additional implication(s) from these statements. Examine these statements and implications for internal contradictions. Locate opposing claims between the various arguments and assign relative weightings to opposing claims. Increase the weighting when the claims have ...

See also:

Critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overview, Critical thinking - Methods of critical thinking, Critical thinking - Overcoming bias, Critical thinking - Reaching a conclusion, Critical thinking - Critical thinking in the classroom, Critical thinking - Quotation

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The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern — a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing: Margaret Mead, noted anthropologist, shows a flashlight to the indigenous New Guinea people. People blind since birth are suddenly enabled to see. British underground philosopher Michael Swann advocat ...

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Paradigm shift, Paradigm shift - Kuhnian Paradigm Shifts, Paradigm shift - Examples of paradigm shifts in science, Paradigm shift - Other Uses

Read more here: » Paradigm shift: Encyclopedia II - Paradigm shift - Other Uses

A sample is biased if some members of the population are more likely to be chosen in the sample than others. A biased sample will generally give you a misestimate of the quantity being estimated. For example, if your sample contains members with a higher or lower value of the quantity being estimated, the outcome will be higher or lower than the true value. A famous case of what can go wrong when using a biased sample is found in the 1936 US presidential election polls. The Literary Digest held a poll that forecast that Alfred ...

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Bias statistics, Bias statistics - Biased sample, Bias statistics - Biased estimator, Bias statistics - External link

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An error may be a piece of incorrectly written program code. A syntax error is an ungrammatical or nonsensical statement in a program; one that cannot be parsed by the language implementation. A logic error is a mistake in the algorithm used, which causes erroneous results or undesired operation. Anti-patterns, or undesirable program design elements, may make it harder to detect or correct errors. An error may also be an exception, a condition which arises during program execution due to an unexpecte ...

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Error, Error - Statistics, Error - Experimental science, Error - Engineering, Error - Medicine, Error - Aviation, Error - Telecommunication, Error - Computer programming, Error - Linguistics, Error - Biology, Error - Baseball

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Another kind of bias in statistics does not involve biased samples, but does involve the use of a statistic whose average value differs from the value of the quantity being estimated. Suppose we are trying to estimate the parameter θ using an estimator (that is, some function of the observed data). Then the bias of is defined to be In words, this would be "the expected value of the estimator minus the true value θSee also:

Bias statistics, Bias statistics - Biased sample, Bias statistics - Biased estimator, Bias statistics - External link

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