A cognitive bias happens when someone makes a bad choice that they think is a good choice. This bias is an important part of the study of cognitive psychology.[1]
Cognitive biases do happen. Primitive humans and animals do things which seem foolish later. The scientific method limits the results of cognitive bias.
Cognitive bias is a natural consequence of our using "gut feelings" to make decisions when those decisions cannot be made rational because the evidence is not available.
The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972.[2] It grew out of their experience of people's inability to reason with numbers. Tversky, Kahneman, and colleagues showed several repeatable ways in which human judgments and decisions differ from rational choice. The heuristics people use are mental shortcuts which provide swift estimates.[3] Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic errors".
These are some of the cognitive biases that are often studied:
| Name | Information |
|---|---|
| Fundamental attribution error (FAE, aka correspondence bias[4]) | [5] |
| Implicit bias (aka implicit stereotype, unconscious bias) | |
| Priming bias | |
| Confirmation bias | [6] [7] |
| Affinity bias | [8] |
| Self-serving bias | |
| Belief bias | |
| Framing | |
| Hindsight bias | |
| Embodied cognition | |
| Anchoring bias | An example of the anchoring effect, is that a person can be more likely to buy a car if it is placed next to a more expensive model (the anchor). During negotiations, prices that are lower than the price of the anchor, may seem reasonable, or can even seem cheap to the buyer, even if those prices are (still) relatively higher than the actual market value of the car.[9] [10] |
| Status quo bias | [11] [12] |
| Overconfidence effect | [13] Related page: Dunning–Kruger effect. |
| Physical attractiveness stereotype | (A habit or) tendency to (think or) assume that people who are
physically attractive, are desirable for other reasons, too.[14] |
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