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. T ...
A cognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science and social psychology including very basic statistical, social attribution, and memory errors that are common to all human beings. Biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. Social biases, usually called attributional biases affect our everyday social interactions. And biases related to probability and decision making significantly affect the scientific method which is deliberately designed to minimize such bias fr ...
The valence effect of prediction is the tendency for people to simply overestimate the likelihood of good things happening rather than bad things. ("Valence" refers to the positive or negative emotional charge something has.)
This finding has been corroborated by dozens of studies. In one straightforward experiment, all other things being equal, participants assigned a higher probability to picking a card that had a smiling face on ...
In 1948, psychologist Bertram R. Forer gave a personality test to his students, and then gave them a personality analysis, supposedly based on the test's results. He invited each of them to rate the analysis on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) as it applied to themselves: the average was 4.26. He then revealed that each student had been given the same analysis:
"You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are gene ...
The following is a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases
Hindsight bias sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable
Fundamental attribution error the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
Confirmation bias the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms o ...
Confirmation bias is a type of statistical bias describing the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. In inductive inference, confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. To compensate for this observed human tendency, the scientific method is constructed so that we must try to disprove our hypotheses. See falsifiability.
Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out a ...
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence or rationality.
Studies have consistently shown that, holding all else equal, subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. See positive outcome bias.
Prominent examples of wishful thinking include:
Economist Irving Fisher said that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" a few weeks before Stock ...
Later studies have found that subjects give higher accuracy ratings if the following are true
the subject believes that the analysis only applies to them
the subject believes in the authority of the evaluator
the analysis lists mainly positive traits
See (Dickson and Kelly 1985) for a review of the literature.
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The study of group polarization began with an unpublished 1961 Master’s thesis by MIT student James Stoner, who observed the so-called "risky shift", meaning that a group’s decisions are riskier than the average of the individual decisions of members before the group met. The discovery of the risky shift was considered surprising and counterintuitive, especially since earlier work in the 1920s and 1930s by Allport and other researchers suggested that individuals made more extreme decisions than did groups, leading to the expectation that ...
In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking can also be a specific logical fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that because we wish something to be true or false that it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P is true/false, therefore P is true/false."[1]
For example:
The teacher gave us a difficult exam! We shouldn't have to be subjected ...
Study of this effect has shown that after participating in a discussion group, members tend to advocate more extreme positions and call for riskier courses of action than individuals who did not participate in any such discussion. This phenomenon was originally coined risky shift but was found to apply to more than risk, so the replacement term choice shift has been suggested.
In addition, attitudes such as racial and sexual prejudice tend to be reduced (for already low-prejudice individuals) and inflated (for already high ...
