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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 Heuristic s, 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.


TYPES OF COGNITIVE BIASES

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

  • Focalism Bias the tendency to focus and place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

  • 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 one's preconceptions.

  • Self-serving Bias the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.



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