Examples Of Cognitive Bias

Two phenomena- hindsight bias and judgmental overconfidence- illustrate why we can’t rely solely on intuition and common sense.

In Chapter 3, there were 12 areas of bias spread across the 3 areas of heuristics. The main theme of the text was to prove that we are predisposed to certain outcomes. As we make important decisions we rely on our memory, or a number of past events, or even ignoring facts. Overall, we are biased in many ways when it comes to making decisions, or predicting outcomes of a particular event.

In this article, “Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions” (2015), social scientist Sendhil Mullainathan interprets numerous amounts of case studies of how skin color affects African-Americans in normal routine things such as finding a job, buying a car or selling an IPod for example.

C. (1988). Outcome bias in decision evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 569-579.

Confirmation bias is our feeling to choose the information that confirms what we belief or the ideas we have on a subject. Sometimes this can lead us to misjudge or make wrong decisions. The pilots of flight 5191 out of Lexington airport let their belief of the situation make them make the wrong decision and not confirm they were on the right runway. Pilots Clay and Polehinke ignored the warning signs of the unlit runway, too short runway and their distracted conversation during the pre-flight time.

My topic is about the role of hindsight bias in real life. It is important to know how hindsight bias affects people’s life, especially people’s cognition.

Understanding how our brain works can help us understand why all individuals have unconscious biases. Blair (2007) gave an example of the elephant and the blind man story where six blind people, who have never seen an elephant, had different description of an elephant (pillar, rope, thick branch of a tree, big hand fan, huge wall, solid pipe) based on what they touched. On the one hand, they were all right but, on the other, they were all wrong as they just had the chunks of the bigger picture. This gives us an insight of what humans are like and how they see the world based on the lens of their experience.

The study was conducted at Belmont University. The participants are from the introduction to psychology classes on campus. They were granted course credit in return for participating in the study. The age range is approximately 18 to 24, the average being blank #. There were blank # of females, and blank # of males. The study is confidential, everything is anonymous, and their participation was voluntary.

Cognitive dissonance is a state in which one’s emotions of anxiety and discomfort are entangled within a clash of personal philosophies, encompassed by discrepancy. Furthermore, it has been experienced by the Germans after the Second World War, as they question whether they should forgive themselves for falling victim to the Nazi Party’s deceptions and the suppression of societal ideologies. This is also an antithetical, allegorical stipulation experienced by Michael within the novel The Reader, by German novelist; Bernhard Schlink. Regarding this, the facts can be illustrated through Michael’s predicating love for Hanna; through the feeling of guilt as to whether he should forgive himself for the approbation of Hanna’s foreboding seduction.

In Chapter Six, the topic of decision making biases and errors was examined. This section examines several bias and errors individuals make when attempting to excuse a decision. In addition to confirmation bias, availability bias was explored in this chapter. According to the text, available bias is defined as an individual’s tendency to make judgement on information that is readily available. To clarify, availability bias is a cognitive bias that make it seems like vivid events are more likely to occur. We can contribute the reason for individuals to overestimate the chances of unlikely events to the media, due to the magifaction of specializing events (memorable and vivid) on a larger societal level.

I decided to write about some instances of potential cognitive dissonance concerning inconsistent events. There are many hints surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack that there was a person in authority that had prior knowledge of Japan's plans of attacking the base. Despite knowing that these plans had the potential to be carried out, they made the decision to stand idle on the matter. As a result, they lost 2,403 people that day. Most people are given the same generic information in textbook form. In many cases, people take those same lies for truth. Through the very different change in information people often enter a state of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is partially the media's fault in many cases. Observing the same case from

Another explanation for cognitive biases is that essentially, life is hard. We’re faced with increasingly more situations and questions to face, and our brains struggle to make complex choices. Cognitive biases allow the brain to make mental shortcuts, effectively saving time and energy and helping us make the world just a little bit simpler. For confirmation bias, it requires far less mental energy to absorb a piece of information that confirms what we already know, compared to having to absorb an entirely new piece of information that challenges our thoughts and ideas..

Things stored in recent memory are more easily accessed, or available for recall, which may cause one to judge events as more probable than they are in reality. Familiarity can also diminish correct results (Kahneman, 2011 as cited in Matlin, 2013). The recognition heuristic is an example of the availability heuristic that happens when one compares the relative frequency of two categories, but recognizes only one of the two, and estimates that to be the higher frequency. The term illusionary correlation comes from believing two variables are statistically related, even when lacking evidence of such. The availability heuristic also can contribute to stereotyping. The social cognition approach traces stereotyping to normal cognitive processes (Reber, 2004, Risen et al., 2007, as cited by Matlin., 2013). An example of an individual using the availability heuristic would be a person who has an upcoming trip planned, and after having watched multiple news reports of plane crashes, decides to take a train instead. The individual would be basing the decision not to fly on the recency and frequency of crash reports, erroneously deducing it is unsafe to fly. The individual would be successful, however in that there is very low likelihood of dying in a plane crash while aboard a

inaugurated a new wave of research both re-examining the body of knowledge regarding bias, and applying it to provider-patient interactions.

There is one notable example of a time in which I personally experienced someone behaving in a prejudiced way, and it always sort of stuck with me because of how sincere and emotional that prejudice seemed to be at the time. Prejudice can be defined as a prejudgment about something or someone without looking at all the facts or information (Soltero 2016). In this case, the prejudiced behavior clearly displayed its cognitive level, emotional level, action-orientation level, and of course its self-justification. All of it painted the picture of an individual who truly believed, for whatever reason, that his prejudiced beliefs were legitimate - And he wasn't going to accept otherwise. First let's go over the story of what actually happened.