Download Cognitive Bias www.AssignmentPoint.com A cognitive bias is a

Cognitive Bias
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A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby
inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an
illogical fashion. Individuals create their own "subjective social
reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's
construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their
behaviour in the social world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes
lead
to
perceptual
distortion,
inaccurate
judgment,
illogical
interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may
lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore,
cognitive biases enable faster decisions when timeliness is more
valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics. Other cognitive
biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, resulting
from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality),
or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.
A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified
over the last six decades of research on human judgment and
decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and
behavioral economics. Cognitive biases are important to study
because "systematic errors" highlight the "psychological processes
that underlie perception and judgement" (Tversky & Kahneman,1999,
p. 582). Moreover, Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue that
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cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas
including clinical judgment.
The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and
Daniel Kahneman in 1972 and grew out of their experience of
people's innumeracy, or inability to reason intuitively with the greater
orders
of
magnitude.
Tversky,
Kahneman
and
colleagues
demonstrated several replicable ways in which human judgments and
decisions differ from rational choice theory. Tversky and Kahneman
explained human differences in judgement and decision making in
terms of heuristics. Heuristics involve mental shortcuts which provide
swift estimates about the possibility of uncertain occurrences
(Baumeister & Bushman, 2010, p. 141). Heuristics are simple for the
brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic
errors" (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, p. 1125).
For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as the
tendency to "judge the frequency or likelihood" of an occurrence by
the extent of which the event "resembles the typical case" (Baumeister
& Bushman, 2010, p. 141). The "Linda Problem" illustrates the
representativeness heuristic. Participants were given a description of
"Linda" that suggests Linda might well be a feminist (e.g., she is said
to be concerned about discrimination and social justice issues). They
were then asked whether they thought Linda was more likely to be a
"(a) bank teller" or a "(b) bank teller and active in the feminist
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movement". A majority chose answer (b). This error (mathematically,
answer (b) cannot be more likely than answer (a)) is an example of
the “conjunction fallacy”; Tversky and Kahneman argued that
respondents chose (b) because it seemed more "representative" or
typical of persons who might fit the description of Linda. The
representativeness heuristic may lead to errors such as activating
stereotypes and inaccurate judgements of others (Haselton et al.,
2005, p. 726).
Alternatively, critics of Kahneman and Tversky such as Gerd
Gigerenzer argue that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of
human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather
to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the
rules of formal logic or the probability calculus. Nevertheless,
experiments such as the “Linda problem” grew into the heuristics and
biases research program which spread beyond academic psychology
into other disciplines including medicine and political science.
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