9 ms·
List of Cognitive Biases
- jingalings 7y agoRelated, great resource that talks about these + mental models https://fs.blog/ https://fs.blog/
- SubiculumCode 7y agoSome of which may be replicated. I'd be tempted to down-vote myself for snarky trolling except that I work in the field of psychological research, and perhaps it is my bias, but many of the cognitive biases that came from social-psychology research do not stand up to scrutiny, too frequently resulting from bad statistical practice...at least two decades ago.
- mycl 7y agoCan you expand on that? My impression is that Kahneman and Tversky "proved" that human cognition is not Bayesian and now much of cognitive psychology is turning around and saying, no, they didn't, and it is. As a layperson, I don't know whom to believe.
- reallydontask 7y agoRichard Nisbett claims that with training a lot of the biases can be overcome (I'm paraphrasing) There is an interesting course of his on Coursera ( https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware)
- raxxorrax 7y agoAs someone who had pseudo-scientific anti-bias techniques applied on myself as an infant, I tend to agree. Now that may actually be real bias... I believe many biases listed here can substantiate themselves.
- dang 7y agoPrevious threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=List%20of%20Cognitive%20Biases%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=List%20of%20Cognitive%20Biases...
- alecco 7y agoThinking Fast and Slow explains many cognitive biases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow
- srik 7y agoBeing reminded of cognitive biases on a regular basis does wonders for staying grounded! I currently use a browser plugin for that but this poster seems like a better alternative — https://designhacks.co/products/cognitive-bias-codex-poster https://designhacks.co/products/cognitive-bias-codex-poster
- james_in_the_uk 7y agoVersion that is readable on mobile: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Cognitive_Bias_Codex_-_180%2B_biases%2C_designed_by_John_Manoogian_III_%28jm3%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Cognitiv...
- joshschreuder 7y agoWhat's the browser extension?
- srik 7y agohttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/my-cognitive-bias/cmapeoagadpppgajnicpagcgpdklfhch https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/my-cognitive-bias/...
- toomim 7y agoWow, there are now 194 listed Cognitive Biases. The number keeps growing. It is an awful sign for a scientific community when they are working on a theory that includes 196 different exceptions and adjustments that have to be made in order to make a model fit the data. It means that your underlying model probably isn't right. This reminds me of when Astronomers thought the universe revolves around the Earth, rather than the Sun. The earth-centered theory made sense until we got better data, and then sometimes planets appeared to go backwards. Sometimes they appeared to swirl around a line. Sometimes there were swirls within the swirls, and sometimes swirls within those: https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation/retrogrades.png https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation/retrogrades... Astronomers had to account for this data with a complex set of retrograde motions and epicycles layered upon epicycles. These complexities only increased as telescopes and charting techniques improved, uncovering more distortions from in the idealized orbital lens. Take, for instance, the numerous parameterized gears required for an early Galilean planetary model: https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation/galileo2.jpg https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation/galileo2.jp... Only when Copernicus and Kepler put the sun in the center of the universe could the models be simplified. Suddenly, each planet's orbit fit a perfect elipse -- no epicycles, no retrograde motions. We can do the same thing for Economic theory, by moving the center of the utility function from the future to the present. Right now, Economics models humans as optimizing future outcomes. The modeled humans are focused on the future: they allocate infinite attention to computing the optimal action for the future. But real humans have scarce attention for computing the future. When they run out of attention, these 194 heuristics and biases display themselves in full effect. We solve this dilemma when we evaluate the utility function in the present, rather than the future. Instead of assuming humans have infinite attention, the utility function itself predicts how humans allocate their scarce attention. The new utility function evaluates the utility of attention itself. And it turns out that we can empirically measure this value of this utility function, by running controlled experiments online with 1,000s of participants, and paying them different amounts of money to attend to different tasks. This lets us measure how much utility people ascribe to paying attention to television shows, sexy pictures, video games, advertisements, iPhone screens, or reddit posts. We can measure it in pennies per second. This new model is a measurable Attention Economics: https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation.html https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation.html
- owenshen24 7y agoWhile I think it's good for pedagogical purposes to have a catalogue of many examples of where our thinking goes wrong, I worry that these lists can give off the wrong idea that our thinking is broken in so many "different" ways. In some sense, many of these biases seem like specific instances of a more general phenomenon. For example, illusion of control and pareidolia both seem like they'd arise if you buy into the brain as doing [predictive processing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...). So it's not exactly that we have over 100 ways that our thinking goes wrong, but that the same types of mistakes occur in different ways. In which case, for preventative reasons, knowing the core mechanism at play seems much more important. Similarly, I feel that lists of mental models might also be missing the point; no one can really go through a list of 100+ items to figure out which one is at play. You're going to need a smaller, more general toolkit.
- perfmode 7y agowhat toolkit do you use?
- owenshen24 7y agoI don't have something that feels comprehensive yet, but another more general concept aside from predictive processing that I've been thinking about is substituting a hard thing for an easy thing, if the easy thing looks like the hard thing. Examples: - Following through the steps of a proof vs covering up the proof and doing it yourself - Asking yourself if something sounds familiar instead of trying to summarize it - Criticizing an idea instead of adding a new one or suggesting an improvement
- buybackoff 7y agoI was a big fan of cognitive psychology and biases and tried to read as much books as possible on the subject. Even had a mind-map on finished and TODO books (https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/buybackoff/8746464/10862/10862_original.gif https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/buybackoff/8746464/10862/108... upper-right corner). I think the best practical material on the subject is Charlie Munger talks. Particularly his talk "On the psychology of human misjudgement" (https://buffettmungerwisdom.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/mungerspeech_june_95.pdf https://buffettmungerwisdom.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/mung...) and "Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger", which is an edited collectoin of his many talks. My main conclusion from reading all the books/talks is that you could only be aware of the existence of the biases, but cannot realize which one(s) is(are) at play now in your brain and cannot "fix" a bias with any cognitive effort. So "sleeping on"/delaying an important decision is the best practical way I have found to mitigate the always present pervasive biases.
- iscrewyou 7y agoUbrelated, but can I ask what mind mapping software you used?
- mettamage 7y agoI use Freeplane + a private git repo to 'store it in the cloud'. I don't mindmap sensitive data yet, if I would, then the private git repo would be on a Raspberry Pi.
- iscrewyou 7y agoThanks. I’ll take a look. I was hoping it was a standalone application.
- buybackoff 7y agoMindjet's MindManager. But it's rather expensive and I stopped using the mind map concept at all. Either because other tools are so bad in comparison with this one or because PowerPoint+Excel do the job (visualization + keeping lists of things) better.
- JonathanCreek 7y agoI had a class at Babson about “Decisions”. Best class ever. My favorite case was about decision making process at NASA that led to the Discovery disaster. Along the case (you can find multiple versions online and it is an awesome read) there was this HBR article about flaws in decision making process. “The Hidden Traps in Decision Making” by by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12948100_The_Hidden_Traps_in_Decision_Making https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12948100_The_Hidden...
- zomg 7y agoi went to babson as well -- too bad i missed this class, sounds interesting! i grabbed a copy of that HBR article and will read it later. thanks!
- baxtr 7y agoI am wondering which of these are "solid" enough to be considered? I am asking because of the "replication crisis" which affected also Kahneman et. al. EDIT: I am genuinely interested in knowing, since it would be helpful to know which of these are reliable - in order to change my behavior accordingly. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psycholo... https://replicationindex.com/category/kahneman/ https://replicationindex.com/category/kahneman/
- mar77i 7y agoBeware of potential recursion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot
- samdung 7y agoThis is purely my opinion. All theories within Psychology and Economics are based on people being 'rational'. Any thing contrary to their theory is branded 'irrational' and given a name. The name usually sounds like a 'disease/ailment'.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoWell, people shared your intuition for a while but then new results came up. This literature started with the supposed rationality of compelling axioms of decision making by Ramsey, von Neumann, Savage, etc. These are in the end based on measurement theory. People noticed early that humans seem to remain rational even if they violate intuitively acceptable rationality postulate. Take Luce's coffee cup example as an illustration. You prefer black coffee to sweet coffee. Suppose you compare coffee with no sugar to coffee with one grain of sugar added. You're indifferent: a~b. Then add another grain, and so on. You will get comparisons a~b, b~c, c~d, e~f, ..., j~k, and then suddenly a>k, a violation of the supposed transitivity of equipreference (aka indifference, equally good). But that seems to be rational. So people relaxed rationality requirements and now there is the problem what 'rationality' actually means. Fast forward a few years and empirical studies found the following strange behavior: If you mention a high number before asking people for some fictional charity contribution, then people tend to be be willing to pay more than if you mention a low number before, and it does not matter in which way you mention the numbers. (Actual experiments were made by making people roll a rigged lottery wheel before doing some completely different task, for example.) You can even tell participants about the observed effect before, it will still be observed. I see no way how this "anchoring effect" could be described as being rational. But many people nowadays share your opinion, and there is a whole field called "ecological rationality" in which scholars try to re-interpret supposedly irrational biases as good and rational heuristics increasing e.g. evolutionary fitness. I don't think they're right in general, though. Some of the biases are just flaws. If I flash a number before your eyes and this affects your subsequent decision making, then that's not a useful heuristics, it's a flaw in your brain processing. My 2 cents, others disagree with me.
- simonh 7y ago>Some of the biases are just flaws. It's probably a trait that is (or was) advantageous in one context, that is disadvantageous in this new or less vital context.
- Tepix 7y agoDo we suffer from normalcy bias when dealing with the effects of global warming? It sure looks that way.
- glutamate 7y agoThe list is missing "The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics" (https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/RBE-0092 https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/RBE-0092)
- ergest 7y agoGerd Gigerenzer's work and the book Simple Rules are far more efficient ways of making better decisions than reading a list of 100+ "biases" and trying to overcome them. A good intro is Risk Savvy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnRWVmWQG24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnRWVmWQG24
- ujjain 7y agoI think human rational thinking is completely f*cked. We are just not capable of thinking very logically/rationally. I think all the more reason to meditate, be mindful and adopt philosophies that are not always rational, but good instead. Also, the truth is often very complex or very dark, so thinking is only going to bring incorrect simplified (black/white) conclusions or negativity/resentment.
- mar77i 7y agoYou just reminded me... https://www.xkcd.com/1163/ https://www.xkcd.com/1163/
- foobar_ 7y agoDefense mechanisms are far more interesting
- tasuki 7y agoIt's an alphabetically sorted list, sure one can read the whole list top to bottom, but it just doesn't flow very well. If you're interested in rationality and cognitive biases, I'd highly recommend reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Rationality: A-Z" sequences: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoHow many of these will appear naturally in powerful AI systems? Perhaps many! Maybe by trying to emulate a human brain we will end up recreating its flaws. I am very excited in the progress of deep learning applied to symbolic, logical reasoning, like theorem proving. Theorem verification is easy and tractable, proving is not. We can have heuristic algorithms come up with provably correct algorithms! That is vaguely analogous to a human writing a program then proving it correct. Now that will be useful.
- matthewtoast 7y agoI wonder if we might achieve better* results in some systems if we added in these biases on purpose. (I.e. treated them like features, not bugs or even emergent patterns.)
- hsnewman 7y agoAre these just made up or found by scientific method?
- gmiller123456 7y agoThose two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But a lot of them have been studied pretty extensively, I know I've seen a lot on the "Anchoring".
- 11thEarlOfMar 7y agoWhich biases are startup founders more likely to fall into?
- rumpope 7y agoA more digestible format for this: https://busterbenson.com/piles/cognitive-biases/ https://busterbenson.com/piles/cognitive-biases/
- DantesKite 7y agoI once tried memorizing this list of cognitive biases but eventually came to the conclusion they were ill-defined and in some cases, not even biases at all, but a heuristic to keep me alive and well-functioning.
- failrate 7y agoI tried to memorize them, but recency bias meant I only remember the last one in the list.
- futureastronaut 7y agoI tried to think of others, but availability bias means I'm stuck on recency bias.
- viburnum 7y agoA lot of the anti-bias discourse is aimed at getting people to stop being human and start being libertarian robots.
- aoeusnth1 7y agoI memorized them as well, and although I agree with you on some level, I think it does actually help me gain a better understanding of how other people think (or past me). I'm not sure it actually made me better at making decisions, tho.
- sizzle 7y agoAnyone want to work with me to create a cognitive debiasing AI algorithm/chat bot?
- kekeke 7y agoThat would be really interesting project. Only up for it if it's open source.
- asavadatti 7y agoAccording to Daniel Kahneman the research on whether biases can be overcome is "not encouraging". https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-cognitive-biases-tricking-your-brain https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-cognitive-biases-tric...