Cognitive Bias - Types of Cognitive Biases

Types of Cognitive Biases

Biases can be distinguished on a number of dimensions. For example, there are biases specific to groups (such as the risky shift) as well as biases at the individual level.

Some biases affect decision-making, where the desirability of options has to be considered (e.g., Sunk Cost fallacy). Others such as Illusory correlation affect judgment of how likely something is, or of whether one thing is the cause of another. A distinctive class of biases affect memory, such as consistency bias (remembering one's past attitudes and behavior as more similar to one's present attitudes).

Some biases reflect a subject's motivation, for example, the desire for a positive self-image leading to Egocentric bias and the avoidance of unpleasant cognitive dissonance. Other biases are due to the particular way the brain perceives, forms memories and makes judgments. This distinction is sometimes described as "Hot cognition" versus "Cold Cognition", as motivated reasoning can involve a state of arousal.

Among the "cold" biases, some are due to ignoring relevant information (e.g. Neglect of probability), whereas some involve a decision or judgement being affected by irrelevant information (for example the Framing effect where the same problem receives different responses depending on how it is described) or giving excessive weight to an unimportant but salient feature of the problem (e.g., Anchoring).

The fact that some biases reflect motivation, and in particular the motivation to have positive attitudes to oneself accounts for the fact that many biases are self-serving or self-directed (e.g. Illusion of asymmetric insight, Self-serving bias, Projection bias). There are also biases in how subjects evaluate in-groups or out-groups; evaluating in-groups as more diverse and "better" in many respects, even when those groups are arbitrarily-defined (Ingroup bias, Outgroup homogeneity bias).

Some cognitive biases belong to the subgroup of attentional biases which refer to the paying of increased attention to certain stimuli. It has been shown, for example, that people addicted to alcohol and other drugs pay more attention to drug-related stimuli. Common psychological tests to measure those biases are the Stroop Task and the Dot Probe Task.

The following is 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 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggests that at least 8 seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism. It is shown that noisy deviations in the memory-based information processes that convert objective evidence (observations) into subjective estimates (decisions) can produce regressive conservatism, the conservatism (Bayesian), illusory correlations, better-than-average effect and worse-than-average effect, subadditivity effect, exaggerated expectation, overconfidence, and the hard–easy effect.