Cognitive Biases

How did you do on the bouncing ball count test in the video?

Do you think the directions influenced the way you interpreted the sense data?

Look at the rabbit.

Look at the duck.

Now look at the duck and rabbit at the same time.

Can you see the skull?

Ready? 1, 2, 3

Can you see the lady sitting at a makeup table?

What conclusions are you drawing about the ways our expectations influence our perceptions?

What is context?

How does context influence our judgments and interpretations?

“What you see depends mainly on what you look for.” –Stanislaus Jerzy Lee

COGNITIVE BIAS

What is a cognitive bias?

“Unconscious features of human psychology [that] skew our apprehension of reality and interfere with our ability to think clearly, process information accurately, and reason objectively.”

Belief Bias.

“Tendency to evaluate reasoning by how believable its conclusion seems.”

All college students are human beings. Some human beings are CR students. Therefore, some college students are CR students.

What’s wrong with the reasoning?

All college students are human beings. Some human beings are less than six months old. Therefore, some college students are less than six months old.

Why is the flaw in reasoning easier to see here?

AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC

“Assigning a probability to a type of event on the basis of how often one thinks of events of that type.”

Increase in shark attacks?

Increase in school shootings?

Has violent crime increased in the US in the last century?

FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT

“The inclination we may have to assume that our attitudes and those held by people around us are shared by society at large.”

“It’s obvious that….Everyone knows that….No one could believe that….”

Why do we assume that most of the time people will see what we see and think what we think?

THE BANDWAGON EFFECT“Unconscious tendency to align one’s thinking with that of other people.”

How does something become popular?

Why do we all adhere roughly to dominate fashions/styles?

NEGATIVITY BIAS

“The tendency to weigh negative info more heavily than positive info.”

Why do we find it easier to be negative than positive?

ANCHORING EFFECT

The first piece of info you receive creates expectations.

The price tag on the car says $10,000 and you bargain the dealer to $7,500. Did you get a good deal?

If I told you on the first day of class that we’d have 10 exams would feel better when I agreed to lower that number to 4?

BETTER-THAN-AVERAGE-ILLUSION

What are we looking for?

True, Justified Belief