Decision Making - Cognitive and Personal Biases

Cognitive and Personal Biases

Biases can creep into our decision making processes. Many different people have made a decision about the same question (e.g. "Should I have a doctor look at this troubling breast cancer symptom I've discovered?" "Why did I ignore the evidence that the project was going over budget?") and then craft potential cognitive interventions aimed at improving decision making outcomes.

Here is a list of commonly debated biases in judgment and decision making.

• Selective search for evidence (a.k.a. Confirmation bias in psychology) (Scott Plous, 1993) – People tend to be willing to gather facts that support certain conclusions but disregard other facts that support different conclusions. Individuals who are highly defensive in this manner show significantly greater left prefrontal cortex activity as measured by EEG than do less defensive individuals.
• Premature termination of search for evidence – People tend to accept the first alternative that looks like it might work.
• Cognitive inertia – Unwillingness to change existing thought patterns in the face of new circumstances.
• Selective perception – We actively screen-out information that we do not think is important. (See prejudice.) In one demonstration of this effect, discounting of arguments with which one disagrees (by judging them as untrue or irrelevant) was decreased by selective activation of right prefrontal cortex.
• Wishful thinking – a tendency to want to see things in a positive light, which can distort perception and thinking.
• Choice-supportive bias occurs when people distort their memories of chosen and rejected options to make the chosen options seem more attractive.
• Recency – People tend to place more attention on more recent information and either ignore or forget more distant information (see semantic priming). The opposite effect in the first set of data or other information is termed primacy effect.
• Repetition bias – A willingness to believe what one has been told most often and by the greatest number of different sources.
• Anchoring and adjustment – Decisions are unduly influenced by initial information that shapes our view of subsequent information.
• Group think – peer pressure to conform to the opinions held by the group.
• Source credibility bias – A tendency to reject a person's statement on the basis of a bias against the person, organization, or group to which the person belongs. People preferentially accept statement by others that they like (see prejudice).
• Incremental decision making and escalating commitment – We look at a decision as a small step in a process and this tends to perpetuate a series of similar decisions. This can be contrasted with zero-based decision making (see slippery slope).
• Attribution asymmetry – People tend to attribute their own success to internal factors, including abilities and talents, but explain their failures in terms of external factors such as bad luck. The reverse bias is shown when people explain others' success or failure.
• Role fulfillment – A tendency to conform to others' decision-making expectations.
• Underestimating uncertainty and the illusion of control – People tend to underestimate future uncertainty because of a tendency to believe they have more control over events than they really do.
• Framing bias is best avoided by using numeracy with absolute measures of efficacy.

Reference class forecasting was developed to eliminate or reduce cognitive biases in decision making.