1. Which of the cognitive biases that are discussed in Chapter 1 of our text do you think you might be most subject to? Why?
2. What are some other psychological tendencies that you have that might interfere with the objectivity of your thinking? For example, do you tend to be overly generous or selfish? Explain your answers thoroughly.
You MUST include Sourced information in the form of In-text citations
Hello. For question number 1, I copied and paste the pages you can use to write on. You can use any Cognitive Bias you want.
Just FYI I’m a woman.
lly accept facts rather than on the criteria of logic. Is the following specimen good reasoning?
as truth only if the facts agree with
what they already believe.
—Andy Rooney, nicely explaining
belief bias
All Golden retrievers are dogs.
Some dogs are gentle.
Therefore some Golden retrievers are gentle.
It isn’t. You might as well conclude some Golden retrievers are Basset hounds.
After all, all Golden retrievers are dogs and some dogs are Basset hounds. If it took you
a moment to see that the first argument is illogical, it’s because you know it’s conclusion, that some Golden retrievers are gentle, is true.
The tendency to evaluate reasoning by the believability of its conclusion is known
as belief bias. A closely related cognitive bias is confirmation bias, which refers to the
tendency to attach more weight to evidence that supports our viewpoint. If you are a
Democrat, you may view evidence that Fox News is biased as overwhelming; if you are
a Republican you may regard the same evidence as weak and unconvincing. In science,
good experiments are designed to ensure that experimenters can’t “cherry-pick” evidence, that is, search for evidence that supports the hypothesis they think is true while
ignoring evidence to the contrary.
There isn’t any hard-and-fast difference between confirmation bias and belief bias;
they are both unconscious expressions of the human tendency to think our side of an
issue must be the correct side. Thinking critically means being especially critical of
arguments that support our own points of view.
Some cognitive biases involve heuristics, general rules we unconsciously follow
in estimating probabilities. An example is the availability heuristic, which involves
unconsciously assigning a probability to a type of event on the basis of how often
one thinks of events of that type. After watching multiple news reports of an earthquake
or an airplane crash or a case of child abuse,
thoughts of earthquakes and airplane crashes
and child abuse will be in the front of one’s
mind. Accordingly, one may overestimate
their probability. True, if the probability of
airplane crashes were to increase, then one
might well think about airplane crashes more
often; but it does not follow that if one thinks
about them more often, their probability has
increased.
The availability heuristic may explain
how easy it is to make the mistake known as
generalizing from anecdote, a logical fallacy
we discuss later in the book. Generalizing
■ Bad-mouthing someone is
not the same as thinking
critically about what he or
she says.
F rederic L egrand – COMEO /
Shutterstock
*The concept of cognitive biases, as such, originated with Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. See “Judgment under
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases” (1974), in Science, 185 (4157): 1124–1131
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CO GN ITIV E BIASES 17
from anecdote happens when one accepts a sweeping generalization based on a single
vivid report. The availability heuristic is also probably related to the false consensus
effect, which refers to the inclination we may have to assume that our attitudes and
those held by people around us are shared by society at large.*
Another source of skewed belief is the bandwagon effect, which refers to an
unconscious tendency to align one’s thinking with that of other people. The bandwagon
effect is potentially a powerful source of cognitive distortion. In famous experiments,
psychologist Solomon Asch found that what other people say they see may actually alter
what we think we see.** We—the authors—have students take tests and quizzes using
smartphones and clickers, with software that instantly displays the opinion of the class
in a bar graph projected on a screen. Not infrequently it happens that, if opinion begins
to build for one answer, almost everyone switches to that option—even if it is incorrect
or illogical.
If you have wondered why consumer products are routinely advertised as bestsellers, you now know the answer. Marketers understand the bandwagon effect. They
know that getting people to believe that a product is popular generates further sales.
Political propagandists also know we have an unconscious need to align our
beliefs with the opinions of other people. Thus, they try to increase support for a measure by asserting that everyone likes it, or—and this is even more effective—by asserting
that nobody likes whatever the opposition has proposed. Given alternative measures
X and Y, “Nobody wants X!” is even more likely to generate support for Y than is
“Everyone wants Y!” This is because of negativity bias, the tendency people have to
weight negative information more heavily than positive information when evaluating
things. Negativity bias is hard-wired into us: the brain displays more neural activity in
response to negative information than to positive information.†
A corollary to negativity bias from economics is that people generally are more strongly motivated to avoid a
loss than to accrue a gain, a bias known as loss aversion.
It also should come as no surprise that we find it easier to form negative opinions of people who don’t belong to our club, church, party, nationality, or other
group. This is a part of in-group bias, another cognitive factor that may color perception and distort judgment. We may well perceive the members of our own group
as exhibiting more variety and individuality than the members of this or that outgroup, who we may view as indistinguishable from one another and as conforming
to stereotypes. We may attribute the achievements of members of our own group
to gumption and hard work and our failures to bad luck, whereas we may attribute
their failures—those of the members of out-groups—to their personal shortcomings,
while grudgingly discounting their achievements as mere good luck. The tendency
to not appreciate that others’ behavior is as much constrained by events and circumstances as our own would be if we were in their position is known as the fundamental
attribution error.††
Belief Bias / Confirmation Bias/Availability Heuristic/Negativity Bias/In-group Bias.
