cognitive bias

cognitive bias, systematic errors in the way individuals reason about the world due to subjective perception of reality. Cognitive biases are predictable patterns of error in how the human brain functions and therefore are widespread. Because cognitive biases affect how people understand and even perceive reality, they are difficult for individuals to avoid and in fact can lead different individuals to subjectively different interpretations of objective facts. It is therefore vital for scientists, researchers, and decision makers who rely on rationality and factuality to interrogate cognitive bias when making decisions or interpretations of fact. Cognitive biases are often seen as flaws in the rational choice theory of human behaviour, which asserts that people make rational choices based on their preferences.

Although cognitive biases can lead to irrational decisions, they are generally thought to be a result of mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that often convey an evolutionary benefit. The human brain is constantly bombarded with information, and the ability to quickly detect patterns, assign significance, and filter out unnecessary data is crucial to making decisions, especially quick decisions. Heuristics often are applied automatically and subconsciously, so individuals are often unaware of the biases that result from their simplified perception of reality. These unconscious biases can be just as significant as conscious biases—the average person makes thousands of decisions each day, and the vast majority of these are unconscious decisions rooted in heuristics.

One prominent model for how humans make decisions is the two-system model advanced by Israeli-born psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman’s model describes two parallel systems of thought that perform different functions. System 1 is the quick, automated cognition that covers general observations and unconscious information processing; this system can lead to making decisions effortlessly, without conscious thought. System 2 is the conscious, deliberate thinking that can override system 1 but that demands time and effort. System 1 processing can lead to cognitive biases that affect our decisions, but, with self-reflection, careful system 2 thinking may be able to account for those biases and correct ill-made decisions.

One common heuristic that the human brain uses is cognitive stereotyping. This is the process of assigning things to categories and then using those categories to fill in missing information about the thing in question, often unconsciously. For example, if an individual sees a cat from the front, they may assume that the cat has a tail because the heuristic being applied refers to things that fit into the category of “cats have tails.” Filling in missing information such as this is frequently useful. However, cognitive stereotyping can cause problems when applied to people. Consciously or subconsciously putting people into categories often leads one to overestimate the homogeneity of groups of people, sometimes leading to serious misperceptions of individuals in those groups. Cognitive biases that affect how individuals perceive another person’s social characteristics, such as gender and race, are described as implicit bias.

Cognitive biases are of particular concern in medicine and the sciences. Implicit bias has been shown to affect the decisions of doctors and surgeons in ways that are harmful to patients. Further, interpretation of evidence is often affected by confirmation bias, which is a tendency to process new information in a way that reinforces existing beliefs and ignores contradictory evidence. Similar to other cognitive biases, confirmation bias is usually unintentional but nevertheless results in a variety of errors. Individuals who make decisions will tend to seek out information that supports their decisions and ignore other information. Researchers who propose a hypothesis may be motivated to look for evidence in support of that hypothesis, paying less attention to evidence that opposes it. People can also be primed in their expectations. For example, if someone is told that a book they are reading is “great,” they will often look for reasons to confirm that opinion while reading.

Other examples of cognitive bias include anchoring, which is the tendency to focus on one’s initial impression and put less weight on later information—for example, browsing for T-shirts and coming across a very cheap T-shirt first and subsequently thinking all the other shirts you encounter are overpriced. The halo effect is the tendency of a single positive trait to influence a person’s impression of a whole—for example, thinking, without evidence, that an attractive or confident person is also smarter, funnier, or kinder than others. Hindsight bias is the tendency to see events as being more predictable than they were—for example, looking back at a particularly successful investment and attributing success to skill rather than chance. Overgeneralization is a form of cognitive bias in which individuals draw broad conclusions based on little evidence; an example is encountering a very friendly Dalmatian dog and consequently assuming all Dalmatians are very friendly.

Cognitive biases are sometimes confused with logical fallacies. Although logical fallacies are also common ways that humans make mistakes in reasoning, they are not caused by errors in an individual’s perception of reality; rather, they result from errors in the reasoning of a person’s argument.