ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some well-known cognitive biases such as confirmation bias which is ubiquitous. For example, confirmation is a useful heuristic, however, as checking for disconfirmatory evidence is effortful. In the 1970s, Tversky and Kahneman examined a number of biases and heuristics in human thinking. In particular, they studied the representativeness heuristic where an individual or object is assumed to be representative of a category or stereotype. The availability heuristic is used to assess the probability of an event based on the ease with which occurrences come to mind. Anchoring and adjustment refers to a phenomenon whereby people tend to provide an estimate that is influenced by a previously presented number even though the number itself is irrelevant to what they are attempting to judge. Gigerenzer, Todd and the ABC Research Group have argued that we have an ‘adaptive toolbox’ containing specific cognitive mechanisms covering different domains of inference, involving ‘fast and frugal heuristics’. For example, the recognition heuristic relies on relative ignorance to be useful. If one of two objects is recognized and not the other choose the recognized one.
