Monday 25 January 2010

Cognitive Biases & Discrimination

Cognitive Biases
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations (see also cognitive distortion and the lists of thinking-related topics). 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. The existence of some of these cognitive biases has been verified empirically in the field of psychology.

Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior. Some are presumably adaptive, for example, because they lead to more effective actions or enable faster decisions. Others presumably result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms, or from the misapplication of a mechanism that is adaptive under different circumstances.

Discrimination
(Ency Britannica)

in psychology, the ability to perceive and respond to differences among stimuli. It is considered a more advanced form of learning than generalization (q.v.), the ability to perceive similarities, although animals can be trained to discriminate as well as to generalize.

2 comments:

Perseus said...

* Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.
* Base rate fallacy — ignoring available statistical data in favor of particulars.
* Bias blind spot — the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.[1]
* Choice-supportive bias — the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
* Confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
* Congruence bias — the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, in contrast to tests of possible alternative hypotheses.
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# Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.

# Negativity bias — phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
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# Wishful thinking — the formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appeal to evidence or rationality.

Availability cascade — a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").

Gambler's fallacy — the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. Results from an erroneous conceptualization of the Law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."

Hawthorne effect — the tendency of people to perform or perceive differently when they know that they are being observed.

Illusory correlation — beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.

Stereotyping — expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.

Perseus said...

MBTI Bias

The tendency to see other people according to your own Personality Type (world view of your type).