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Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought. [6] Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments.
Detection bias occurs when a phenomenon is more likely to be observed for a particular set of study subjects. For instance, the syndemic involving obesity and diabetes may mean doctors are more likely to look for diabetes in obese patients than in thinner patients, leading to an inflation in diabetes among obese patients because of skewed detection efforts.
Cognitive bias mitigation and cognitive bias modification are forms of debiasing specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their effects. Reference class forecasting is a method for systematically debiasing estimates and decisions, based on what Daniel Kahneman has dubbed the outside view .
Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Although it may seem like such misperceptions would be aberrations, biases can help humans find commonalities and shortcuts to assist in the navigation of common situations in life.
(Note the difference between statistical bias and psychological bias: statistical bias is a purely mathematical result of the judgments being systematically wrong in one direction, whereas psychological bias can arise from a multitude of cognitive effects in thinking, as well as from prejudices, and can lead both to statistical bias and to ...
Recent research on attribution biases has focused on identifying specific types of these biases and their effect on people's behavior. [ 7 ] [ 21 ] Additionally, some psychologists have taken an applied approach and demonstrated how these biases can be understood in real-world contexts (e.g., the workplace or school).
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. Coherent, comprehensive theories of cognitive bias mitigation are lacking.
The neglect of probability, a type of cognitive bias, is the tendency to disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty and is one simple way in which people regularly violate the normative rules for decision making. Small risks are typically either neglected entirely or hugely overrated.