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.
A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation in a search space. 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.
Bounded rationality is the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal.
Decision theory is a branch of applied probability theory and analytic philosophy concerned with the theory of making decisions based on assigning probabilities to various factors and assigning numerical consequences to the outcome.
The conjunction fallacy is an inference that a conjoint set of two or more specific conclusions is likelier than any single member of that same set, in violation of the laws of probability. It is a type of formal fallacy.
The recognition heuristic, originally termed the recognition principle, has been used as a model in the psychology of judgment and decision making and as a heuristic in artificial intelligence. The goal is to make inferences about a criterion that is not directly accessible to the decision maker, based on recognition retrieved from memory. This is possible if recognition of alternatives has relevance to the criterion. For two alternatives, the heuristic is defined as:
If one of two objects is recognized and the other is not, then infer that the recognized object has the higher value with respect to the criterion.
Daniel G. Goldstein is an American cognitive psychologist known for the specification and testing of heuristics and models of bounded rationality in the field of judgment and decision making. He is an honorary research fellow at London Business School and works with Microsoft Research as a principal researcher.
In psychology, the take-the-best heuristic is a heuristic which decides between two alternatives by choosing based on the first cue that discriminates them, where cues are ordered by cue validity. In the original formulation, the cues were assumed to have binary values or have an unknown value. The logic of the heuristic is that it bases its choice on the best cue (reason) only and ignores the rest.
The gaze heuristic is a heuristic used in directing correct motion to achieve a goal using one main variable. An example of the gaze heuristic is catching a ball. The gaze heuristic is one example of psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer's one good reason heuristic, where human animals and non-human animals are able to process large amounts of information quickly and react, regardless of whether the information is consciously processed.
The Max Planck Institute for Human Development is a social science research organization. Located in Berlin, it was initiated in 1961 and officially began operations in 1963 under the name Institute for Educational Research in the Max Planck Society, before receiving its current name in 1971. Its co-founder and first director was Hellmut Becker. The institute is part of the Human Sciences Section of the Max Planck Society.
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.
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.
Heuristics is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems. Often this involves focusing on the most relevant aspects of a problem or situation to formulate a solution. While heuristic processes are used to find the answers and solutions that are most likely to work or be correct, they are not always right or the most accurate. Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete. In that sense they can differ from answers given by logic and probability.
Social heuristics are simple decision making strategies that guide people's behavior and decisions in the social environment when time, information, or cognitive resources are scarce. Social environments tend to be characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and in order to simplify the decision-making process, people may use heuristics, which are decision making strategies that involve ignoring some information or relying on simple rules of thumb.
Ecological rationality is a particular account of practical rationality, which in turn specifies the norms of rational action – what one ought to do in order to act rationally. The presently dominant account of practical rationality in the social and behavioral sciences such as economics and psychology, rational choice theory, maintains that practical rationality consists in making decisions in accordance with some fixed rules, irrespective of context. Ecological rationality, in contrast, claims that the rationality of a decision depends on the circumstances in which it takes place, so as to achieve one's goals in this particular context. What is considered rational under the rational choice account thus might not always be considered rational under the ecological rationality account. Overall, rational choice theory puts a premium on internal logical consistency whereas ecological rationality targets external performance in the world. The term ecologically rational is only etymologically similar to the biological science of ecology.
In behavioural sciences, social rationality is a type of decision strategy used in social contexts, in which a set of simple rules is applied in complex and uncertain situations.
The less-is-more effect refers to the finding that heuristic decision strategies can yield more accurate judgments than alternative strategies that use more pieces of information. Understanding these effects is part of the study of ecological rationality.
Laura Martignon is a Colombian and Italian professor and scientist. From 2003 until 2020 she served as a Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Education at the Ludwigsburg University of Education. Until 2017 she was an Adjunct Scientist of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where she previously worked as Senior Researcher. She also worked for ten years as a Mathematics Professor at the University of Brasilia and spent a period of one and a half years, as visiting scholar, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Intuitive statistics, or folk statistics, is the cognitive phenomenon where organisms use data to make generalizations and predictions about the world. This can be a small amount of sample data or training instances, which in turn contribute to inductive inferences about either population-level properties, future data, or both. Inferences can involve revising hypotheses, or beliefs, in light of probabilistic data that inform and motivate future predictions. The informal tendency for cognitive animals to intuitively generate statistical inferences, when formalized with certain axioms of probability theory, constitutes statistics as an academic discipline.
Ralph Hertwig is a German psychologist whose work focuses on the psychology of human judgment and decision making. Hertwig is Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He grew up with his brothers Steffen Hertwig and Michael Hertwig in Talheim, Heilbronn.
