Wednesday 10 August 2016

Common Cognitive Biases

A number of bloggers, such as Chris Dillow or writers such as Danny Finkelstein write insightful stuff which blends economics, politics with cognitive biases.  I found the following table of commonly studied cognitive biases from Wikipedia very helpful as a summary:

Name

Description
Fundamental attribution error (FAE) Also known as the correspondence bias (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours observed in others. At the same time, individuals under-emphasize the role and power of situational influences on the same behaviour.
Confirmation bias The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. In addition, individuals may discredit information that does not support their views.[29] The confirmation bias is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance. Whereby, individuals may reduce inconsistency by searching for information which re-confirms their views (Jermias, 2001, p. 146).[30]
Self-serving bias The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
Belief bias When one's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.
Framing Using a too-narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.
Hindsight bias Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.