Additive bias is the tendency that prompts solving problems from a wrong or non expected way. Anthony Sanni said, "It can be examplified by a person who works a project through addition even when subtraction is a better approach." [1]
It is a cognitive urge/ tendency of human beings facing problem that they add resources instead of taking or subtracting. According to Keith Holyoak, "Humans seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour, thus requires a mental search for possible changes. [2]
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable for most people, but they can manage it, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.
A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.
Closure or need for closure (NFC), used interchangeably with need for cognitive closure (NFCC), are social psychological terms that describe an individual's desire for a clear, firm answer or peaceful resolution to a question or problem to avert ambiguity.
In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.
Observer bias is one of the types of detection bias and is defined as any kind of systematic divergence from accurate facts during observation and the recording of data and information in studies. The definition can be further expanded upon to include the systematic difference between what is observed due to variation in observers, and what the true value is.
Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), previously called rational therapy and rational emotive therapy, is an active-directive, philosophically and empirically based psychotherapy, the aim of which is to resolve emotional and behavioral problems and disturbances and to help people to lead happier and more fulfilling lives.
A mental model in psychology is an internal representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. The term was coined by Kenneth Craik in 1943 who suggested that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events.
Problem solving is the process of achieving a goal by overcoming obstacles, a frequent part of most activities. Problems in need of solutions range from simple personal tasks to complex issues in business and technical fields. The former is an example of simple problem solving (SPS) addressing one issue, whereas the latter is complex problem solving (CPS) with multiple interrelated obstacles. Another classification of problem-solving tasks is into well-defined problems with specific obstacles and goals, and ill-defined problems in which the current situation is troublesome but it is not clear what kind of resolution to aim for. Similarly, one may distinguish formal or fact-based problems requiring psychometric intelligence, versus socio-emotional problems which depend on the changeable emotions of individuals or groups, such as tactful behavior, fashion, or gift choices.
Emotional reasoning is a cognitive process by which an individual concludes that their emotional reaction proves something is true, despite contrary empirical evidence. Emotional reasoning creates an 'emotional truth', which may be in direct conflict with the inverse 'perceptional truth'. It can create feelings of anxiety, fear, and apprehension in existing stressful situations, and as such, is often associated with or triggered by panic disorder or anxiety disorder. For example, even though a spouse has shown only devotion, a person using emotional reasoning might conclude, "I know my spouse is being unfaithful because I feel jealous."
Keith James Holyoak is a Canadian–American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed how analogy can be used to enhance learning of new abstract concepts by both children and adults, as well as how reasoning breaks down in cases of brain damage.
In psychology, a dual process theory provides an account of how thought can arise in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits. Dual process theories can be found in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology. It has also been linked with economics via prospect theory and behavioral economics, and increasingly in sociology through cultural analysis.
In psychology, the human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and effortful ways, regardless of intelligence. Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending cognitive effort. The cognitive miser theory is an umbrella theory of cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attributional biases to explain when and why people are cognitive misers.
In social psychology, a motivated tactician is someone who shifts between quick-and-dirty cognitively economical tactics and more thoughtful, thorough strategies when processing information, depending on the type and degree of motivation. Such behavior is a type of motivated reasoning. The idea has been used to explain why people use stereotyping, biases and categorization in some situations, and more analytical thinking in others.
Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened. Counterfactual thinking is, as it states: "counter to the facts". These thoughts consist of the "What if?" and the "If only..." that occur when thinking of how things could have turned out differently. Counterfactual thoughts include things that – in the present – could not have happened because they are dependent on events that did not occur in the past.
The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It overlaps with psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.
Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases – unconscious, automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce reasoning errors.
Automation bias is the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct. Automation bias stems from the social psychology literature that found a bias in human-human interaction that showed that people assign more positive evaluations to decisions made by humans than to a neutral object. The same type of positivity bias has been found for human-automation interaction, where the automated decisions are rated more positively than neutral. This has become a growing problem for decision making as intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits have increasingly integrated computerized system monitors and decision aids to mostly factor out possible human error. Errors of automation bias tend to occur when decision-making is dependent on computers or other automated aids and the human is in an observatory role but able to make decisions. Examples of automation bias range from urgent matters like flying a plane on automatic pilot to such mundane matters as the use of spell-checking programs.
