Common Theoretical Causes of Some Cognitive Biases
- Bounded rationality – limits on optimization and rationality
- Prospect theory
- Mental accounting
- Adaptive bias – basing decisions on limited information and biasing them based on the costs of being wrong.
- Attribute substitution – making a complex, difficult judgment by unconsciously substituting it by an easier judgment
- Attribution theory
- Salience
- Naïve realism
- Cognitive dissonance, and related:
- Impression management
- Self-perception theory
- Heuristics, including:
- Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples
- Representativeness heuristic – judging probabilities on the basis of resemblance
- Affect heuristic – basing a decision on an emotional reaction rather than a calculation of risks and benefits
- Some theories of emotion such as:
- Two-factor theory of emotion
- Somatic markers hypothesis
- Introspection illusion
- Misinterpretations or misuse of statistics; innumeracy.
A 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggested that at least eight seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes noisy information processing during storage and retrieval of information in human memory.
Read more about this topic: List Of Biases In Judgment And Decision Making
Famous quotes containing the words common, theoretical, cognitive and/or biases:
“Panurge was of medium stature, neither too large, nor too small ... and subject by nature to a malady known at the time as “Money-deficiency,”Ma singular hardship; nevertheless, he had sixty-three ways of finding some for his needs, the most honorable and common of which was by a form of larceny practiced furtively.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.”
—Whitney Balliet (b. 1926)