Common (judgmental) biases

9 important questions on Common (judgmental) biases

What does representativeness heuristic mean?

  • Also know as similarity heuristic
  • Is used when making judgment about the probabilities of an uncertain event
  • The likelihood of a hypothesis is evaluated by considering the degree to which available info is representative of the hypothesis
  • The probability that X belongs to set Y is judged on the basis of how similar X is to the stereotype of Y
--> example of a dog

What is base rate neglect?

Conditional probability of some hypothesis given some evidence is assessed without taking sufficient account of the 'base rates' when determining P(H+|info)
People rely on the representativeness heuristic and overweigh P(info|H+)

What is the law of small numbers?

A Short sequence of events generated by a random process will have characteristics that closely resemble those of the generating process
Not only globally across the entire sequence, but also locally in each of its parts
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What is biased search for evidence?

Tendency to look for information that is expected if one's hypothesis were true, rather than if it were false
Happens deliberate to reduce or avoid cognitive dissonance

What is the ostrich effect?

  • Given preliminary bad news people optimally choose to avoid collecting additional information: they 'put their head in the sand' to shield themselves from further news
  • In contrast, given preliminary favorable news, individuals seek out definitive information

This effect is tested in Karlsson, Loewenstein & Seppi (2009)
  • Informational logins Swedisch pension accounts 2002-2004
  • People log in more if they had a good week on the stock market

What is belief perseverance?

The tendency to stick to a belief after discrediting information, even when all initial evidence leading to the belief is shown false

What is an anchoring bias?

Tendency to rely too heavily on one piece of information in evaluations

What do we mean with an insufficient adjustment?

Initial values are insufficiently adjusted; estimates are biased in the direction of initial values.
Different starting points yield in different estimates

Explain concept of bounded rationality

Behavioral economics does not show or say that humans are most of the time delusional and behaving sub optimally

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