Concept
Cognitive bias
Overview
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
While cognitive biases may initially appear to be negative, some are adaptive. They may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable 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), the impact of an individual's constitution and biological state (embodied cognition), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing. Cognitive biases can make individuals more inclined to endorsing pseudoscientific beliefs by requiring less evidence for claims that confirm their preconceptions. This can potentially distort their perceptions and lead to inaccurate judgments.
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. The study of cognitive biases has practical implications for areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance, and management.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
They are, on the contrary, regarded as jealous enemies of our insatiable desire for knowledge; and it almost requires an apology to induce us to tolerate, much less to prize and to respect them. All propositions, indeed, may be logically expressed in a negative form; but, in relation to the content of our cognition, the peculiar province of negative judgements is solely to prevent error. For this reason, too…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Cognitive bias is.
Here, again, the belief that we can know ourselves immediately is as disastrous to moral science as the corresponding idea regarding knowledge of nature was to physical science. Obnoxious "subjectivity" of moral judgment is due to the fact that the immediate or esthetic quality swells and swells and displaces the thought of the active potency which gives activity its moral quality.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
Close in meaning to Cognitive bias; the term itself is not named.
To control inference it is necessary to analyze this complex situation--to determine what is data for inference and what is irrelevant. This analysis involves discriminative resolution into more ultimate simples. The resources of experimentation, all sorts of microscopic, telescopic, and registering apparatus, are called in to perform that analysis. As a result we differentiate not merely visual data from…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
States what Cognitive bias is.
Philosophers who discussed Cognitive bias
Related ideas
- Subjective character of experience
- Norm (philosophy)
- Judgement
- Behavioral economics
- Management
- Probability
- Political science
- Perception
- HarperCollins
- Rational choice model
- Social psychology
- Embodied cognition
- Implicature
- Bias
- Pragmatics
- Logic
- Reproducibility
- Behavior
- Bayes' theorem
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Fallacy
- Cognitive science
- Rationality
- Heuristic
Place in the tradition
Part of Inference.