According to wikipedia cognitive bias is:
…a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a “pattern of deviation” is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. … a general term that is used to describe many observer effects in the human mind, some of which can lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, or illogical interpretation.
Wiki provides a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases:
- Framing by 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.
- Fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
- Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions; this is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
- Self-serving bias is 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 is when one’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.
A more complete list of cognitive biases provides about 100 differrent cognitive biases, in 4 categories:
- 1 Decision-making and behavioral biases (40+)
- 2 Biases in probability and belief (20+)
- 3 Social biases (20)
- 4 Memory errors and biases (10+)
It seems humans have developed quite a number of skills in order to cloak their behavior or motives, and also mislead themselves. What if we try and uncloak group individual attitudes as part of effective group behavior in the midst of complexity?
