Cognitive scientists have identified a wide range of biases and heuristics in human decision making over the past few decades. Only recently have bioethicists begun to think seriously about the implications of these findings for topics such as agency, autonomy, and consent. This article aims to provide an overview of biases and heuristics that have been identified and a framework in which to think comprehensively about the impact of them on the exercise of autonomous decision making. (...) I analyze the impact that these biases and heuristics have on the following dimensions of autonomy: understanding, intentionality, absence of alienating or controlling influence, and match between formally autonomous preferences or decisions and actual choices or actions. (shrink)

: This paper develops four related claims: 1. Critical thinking should focus more on decision making, 2. the heuristics and bias literature developed by cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists provides many insights into human irrationality which can be useful in critical thinking instruction, 3. unfortunately the “rational choice” norms used by behavioral economists to identify “biased” decision making narrowly equate rational decision making with the efficient pursuit of individual satisfaction; deviations from these norms should not be treated as an (...) irrational bias, 4. a richer, procedural theory of rational decision making should be the basis for critical thinking instruction in decision making. (shrink)

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in our judgment or our processing of what we perceive. Its raison d'être is the evolutionary need to produce immediate judgments in order to adopt a position quickly in response to stimuli, problems, or situations that catch our attention for some reason. They have a social dimension because they are present in the interactions and decision-making processes of ordinary life. They can be understood to be an adaptive response to human inability to (...) process all of the available information that we receive and selectively filter through biased reasoning or through procedures and heuristic rules. (shrink)

From the seventies onward a large quantity of theoretical and empirical studies have investigated the heuristic principles and cognitive strategies that individuals use to deal with risky and uncertain situations. This research has shown how the explicative and predictive shortcomings of normative risk analysis depend in many respects on undervaluing the continuous interaction between the individual and the environment. There are factors that, day by day, represent significant obstacles to decision making.

In this paper, we explore the literature on cognitive heuristics and biases in light of virtue epistemology, specifically highlighting the two major positions—agent-reliabilism and agent-responsibilism —as they apply to dual systems theories of cognition and the role of motivation in biases. We investigate under which conditions heuristics and biases might be characterized as vicious and conclude that a certain kind of intellectual arrogance can be attributed to an inappropriate reliance on Type 1, or the improper (...) function of Type 2, cognitive processes. By the same token, the proper intervention of Type 2 processes results in the virtuous functioning of our cognitive systems. Moreover, the role of motivation in attenuating cognitive biases and the cultivation of certain epistemic habits points to the tenets of agent-responsibilism.. (shrink)

Mental arithmetic is characterised by a tendency to overestimate addition and to underestimate subtraction results: the operational momentum effect. Here, motivated by contentious explanations of this effect, we developed and tested an arithmetic heuristics and biases model that predicts reverse OM due to cognitive anchoring effects. Participants produced bi-directional lines with lengths corresponding to the results of arithmetic problems. In two experiments, we found regular OM with zero problems but reverse OM with non-zero problems. In a third experiment, (...) we tested the prediction of our model. Our results suggest the presence of at least three competing biases in mental arithmetic: a more-or-less heuristic, a sign-space association and an anchoring bias. We conclude that mental arithmetic exhibits shortcuts for decision-making similar to traditional domains of reasoning and problem-solving. (shrink)

Approaching science by considering the epistemological virtues which scientists see as constitutive of good science, and the way these virtues trade-off against one another, makes it possible to capture action that may be lost by approaches which focus on either the theoretical or institutional level. Following Wimsatt (1984) I use the notion of heuristics and biases to help explore a case study from the history of biology. Early in the 20th century, mutation theorists and natural historians fought over (...) the role that isolation plays in evolution. This debate was principally about whether replication was the central scientific virtue (and hence the ultimate goal of science to replace non-experimental evidence with experimental evidence) or whether consilience of inductions was the central virtue (and hence, as many kinds of evidence as possible should be pursued). (shrink)

Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counterexample to the acyclicity of the relationship “all things considered better than”. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person’s painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...) evaluate episodes of pain, the use of a heuristic known as similarity-based decision-making explains why our intuitive preferences may violate acyclicity in this example. I argue that this explanation should lead us to regard these preferences with suspicion, because it indicates that they may be the result of one or more biases. I conclude that Rachels’ and Temkin’s example does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting acyclicity. (shrink)

Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counterexample to the acyclicity of the relationship “all things considered better than”. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person’s painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...) evaluate episodes of pain, the use of a heuristic known as similarity-based decision-making explains why our intuitive preferences may violate acyclicity in this example. I argue that this explanation should lead us to regard these preferences with suspicion, because it indicates that they may be the result of one or more biases. I conclude that Rachels’ and Temkin’s example does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting acyclicity. (shrink)

This research study focuses on the problem of populistic propaganda online. In particular, this research study provides three case studies gathered in a Facebook Group of the Italian populistic movement Movimento 5 Stelle. On the one hand, the three case studies provide three powerful counterexamples to the thesis that online media are purposeful aggregator of people. In fact, this research study finds that online media are the perfect environment for populism to thrive. For online media seem to foster the aggregation (...) of people into groups whose main common denominator is the total refusal of anything that opposes the groups’ views. On this basis, this paper provides evidence that online media may impoverish democratic confrontation. On the other hand, this paper finds that the one of the causes of the rapid rise of populistic movements in Western countries might also be related to the problem of cognitive biases. Indeed, the case studies presented in the paper posit the existence of something that is addressed as the trigger effect, i.e. agents’ tendency to react impulsively to any kind of content that fits agent’s views about current events. Specifically, this research study finds that the activation of the trigger effect might be a direct consequence of the activation of the narrow framing bias and of the anchoring heuristic in presence of fake news. (shrink)

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book, first published in 2002, examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their 'heuristics and biases' approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their (...) work highlighted the reflexive mental operations used to make complex problems manageable and illuminated how the same processes can lead to both accurate and dangerously flawed judgments. The heuristics and biases framework generated a torrent of influential research in psychology - research that reverberated widely and affected scholarship in economics, law, medicine, management, and political science. This book compiles the most influential research in the heuristics and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982. (shrink)

Although economists often model decision makers as rational actors, the heuristics and biases literature that springs from the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky demonstrates that people make decisions that depart from the optimal model in systematic ways. These cognitive and behavioral limitations not only cause inefficient decision making, but also lead people to make decisions that are unethical. This article seeks to introduce a selected portion of the heuristics and (...) biases and related psychological literature, to highlight its implications for ethical decision making, and to serve as the basis for a lecture that could inform students regarding these matters. If business actors are on guard against errors in their own decision making processes, perhaps they can avoid some of the ethical pitfalls that recently put Enron and so many other companies in the news. (shrink)

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant (...) value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

Cognitive psychologists have uncovered a number of natural tendencies to systematic errors in thinking. This paper proposes some ways that intellectual character virtues might help correct these sources of epistemic unreliability. We begin with an overview of some insights from recent work in dual-process cognitive psychology regarding ‘biases and heuristics’, and argue that the dozens of hazards the psychologists catalogue arise from combinations and specifications of a small handful of more basic patterns of thinking. We expound four of (...) these, and sketch how they conspire to produce the myriad biases, heuristics, and illusions. We then offer accounts of two character virtues—self-vigilance and intellectual vitality—and explain how these virtues could help correct our error-prone thinking. The self-vigilant person appreciates her vulnerability to natural epistemic defects, is on the watch for cues to the working of these possible error-makers, and intelligently acts to correct for them. The intellectually vital person is naturally or has learned to be energetic, active, alert, attentive, and inquisitive, contrary to the natural tendency to cognitive laziness. We suggest that these intellectual virtues, like the moral virtues, will cluster in the personality, and will tend to be mutually reinforcing and mutually recruiting, even as each has its own corrective function. (shrink)

Redish et al. view addictions as errors arising from the weak access points of the system of decision-making. They do not analytically distinguish between addictions, on the one hand, and errors highlighted by behavioural decision theory, such as over-confidence, representativeness heuristics, conjunction fallacy, and so on, on the other. Redish et al.'s decision-making framework may not be comprehensive enough to capture addictions.

Our programmatic article on Homo heuristicus (Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009) included a methodological section specifying three minimum criteria for testing heuristics: competitive tests, individual-level tests, and tests of adaptive selection of heuristics. Using Richter and Späth’s (2006) study on the recognition heuristic, we illustrated how violations of these criteria can lead to unsupported conclusions. In their comment, Hilbig and Richter conduct a reanalysis, but again without competitive testing. They neither test nor specify the compensatory model of inference they (...) argue for. Instead, they test whether participants use the recognition heuristic in an unrealistic 100% (or 96%) of cases, report that only some people exhibit this level of consistency, and conclude that most people would follow a compensatory strategy. We know of no model of judgment that predicts 96% correctly. The curious methodological practice of adopting an unrealistic measure of success to argue against a competing model, and to interpret such a finding as a triumph for a preferred but unspecified model, can only hinder progress. Marewski, Gaissmaier, Schooler, Goldstein, and Gigerenzer (2010), in contrast, specified five compensatory models, compared them with the recognition heuristic, and found that the recognition heuristic predicted inferences most accurately. (shrink)

Despite the increasing recognition that heuristics may be involved in myriad scientific activities, much about how to use them prudently remains obscure. As typically defined, heuristics are efficient rules or procedures for converting complex problems into simpler ones. But this increased efficiency and problem-solving power comes at the cost of a systematic bias. As Wimsatt showed, biased modelling heuristics can conceal errors, leading to poor decisions or inaccurate models. This liability to produce errors presents a fundamental challenge (...) to the philosophical value of heuristic analyses. Heuristics may be powerful and efficient procedures, but their practical value for science and epistemology is significantly mitigated if we do not have a principled methodology for knowing how to use them wisely. In this essay, I extend Wimsatt’s analyses to argue that this challenge for a heuristic methodology can be met by appealing to second-order, or meta-, heuristics—that is, practical guidelines that prescribe the appropriate conditions for a first-order heuristic’s use. 1 Introduction2 Background3 Heuristics and Meta-heuristics4 A Hierarchical Model and Three Applications4.1 Decision making in emergency medicine4.2 Mathematical explanation in physics4.3 Resilience in ecological management5 Conclusion. (shrink)

Gigerenzer’s ‘external validity argument’ plays a pivotal role in his critique of the heuristics and biases research program (HB). The basic idea is that (a) the experimental contexts deployed by HB are not representative of the real environment and that (b) the differences between the setting and the real environment are causally relevant, because they result in different performances by the subjects. However, by considering Gigerenzer’s work on frequencies in probability judgments, this essay attempts to show that there (...) are fatal flaws in the argument. Specifically, each of the claims is controversial: whereas (b) is not adequately empirically justified, (a) is inconsistent with the ‘debiasing’ program of Gigerenzer’s ABC group. Therefore, whatever reason we might have for believing that the experimental findings of HB lack experimental validity, this should not be based on Gigerenzer’s version of the argument. (shrink)

How does a complex organism develop from a relatively simple, homogeneous mass? The usual answer is: through the (context‐dependent) execution of species‐specific genetic instructions specifying the development of that organism. Commentators are sometimes skeptical of this usual answer, but of course not all commentators, and not always for the same reasons. Here I attempt to lay bare the logical structure of the usual answer through an extended analysis of the heuristics and methodological principles at play in the exploration and (...) explanation of development—and also to show a critical ambiguity that renders the usual answer suspect. (shrink)

There is a large literature on social epistemology, some of which is concerned with expert knowledge. Formal representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like play a larger role in these discussions. Yet these discussions are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The assumptions minimize the role of knowledge, and often assume independence between observers. This paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mutual consilience—a genuinely social notion of epistemology. (...) Using the example of Michael Polanyi’s account of science as an illustration, it introduces the notion of double heuristics: that individuals, each with their own heuristics, each with cognitive biases and limitations, are aggregated by a decision procedure, like voting, and this second order procedure produces its own heuristic, with its own cognitive biases and limitations. An example might be the limited ability of democracies to assimilate expert knowledge. (shrink)

How does a complex organism develop from a relatively simple, homogeneous mass? The usual answer is: through the execution of species-specific genetic instructions specifying the development of that organism. Commentators are sometimes sceptical of this usual answer, but of course not all commentators. Some biologists refer to master control genes responsible for the activation of all the genes responsible for every aspect of organismal development; and some philosophers, most notoriously Rosenberg, buy this claim hook, line, and sinker. Here I explore (...) both the seeming plausibility of the usual position, and also its ultimate inadequacy. (shrink)

Methodological reductionists practice ‘wannabe reductionism’. They claim that one should pursue reductionism, but never propose how. I integrate two strains in prior work to do so. Three kinds of activities are pursued as “reductionist”. “Successional reduction” and inter-level mechanistic explanation are legitimate and powerful strategies. Eliminativism is generally ill-conceived. Specific problem-solving heuristics for constructing inter-level mechanistic explanations show why and when they can provide powerful and fruitful tools and insights, but sometimes lead to erroneous results. I show how traditional (...) metaphysical approaches fail to engage how science is done. The methods used do so, and support a pragmatic and non-eliminativist realism. (shrink)

The target article's finding of stable and general individual differences in solving of problems in heuristics-and-biases experiments is fundamentally subversive to the Meliorist research program's attention-getting claim that human thought is “systematically irrational.” Since some people get these problems right, studies of heuristics and biases may reduce to repeated demonstrations that difficult questions are hard to solve.

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of its parts if it depends upon their mode of organization-a view consistent with reduction. Emergence is a failure of aggregativity, in which ``the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts''. Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving powerful tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different degrees, the structural conditions (...) can provide evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, ``natural kinds'', and detecting functional localization fallacies, approximations, and various biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence and use of these conditions as heuristics is consistent with a broader reductionistic methodology. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to identify the manifestations of speciesism in the history of research into theory of mind in non-human animals and, more importantly, to identify the cognitive biases that contribute to the adoption of incautious and, as we will see in later chapters, often misinterpretations of empirical research. The influence of speciesism is also visible in broadly understood animal studies. The manifestations of species-related chauvinism are present, inter alia, in in considerations on the theory of (...) mind. An analysis of the already classic articles by Premarck and Woodruff (1978) and Calla and Tomasello (2011) reveals an attempt to maintain faith in human uniqueness. Maintaining this belief sometimes involves constructing careless interpretations. (shrink)

The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behavior, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different (...) information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyze an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organism’s fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behavior, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting.. (shrink)

To have enough financial literacy, an investor must be able to make intelligent investment choices, and on the other hand, the heuristic bias, the framing effect, cognitive illusions, and herd mentality are all variables that contribute to the formation of behavioral biases, also known as illogical conduct, in the decision-making process. The current research looks specifically at behavioral biases and financial literacy influence investment choices, particularly on stock market investment. For the research, a representative sample of 450 individual (...) investors was evaluated. A structured questionnaire was designed using the Likert’s scale method to elicit the research variables, and the data acquired were analyzed using the SEM method. According to the findings, there was a statistically significant link between heuristic bias and the development of behavioral bias in decision-making. Nevertheless, cognitive illusions, the herd mentality, and the framing effect all have a deleterious impact on behavioral biases. In addition, investors often adhere to heuristic biases rather than other irrational strategies when making investment judgments. Therefore, individual investors’ financial literacy level greatly influences the choices made about investments in the stock market. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of the system's parts if it depends upon their mode of organization--a view consistent with reduction. Emergence can be analyzed as a failure of aggregativity--a state in which "the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts." Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different (...) degrees, these conditions provide powerful evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, and heuristics for detecting biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence is compatible with reduction. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, (...) third-person preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

We have evolved to become who we are, at least in part, due to our general drive to create new things and ideas. When seeking to improve our creations, ideas, or situations, we systematically overlook opportunities to perform subtractive changes. For example, when tasked with giving feedback on an academic paper, reviewers will tend to suggest additional explanations and analyses rather than delete existing ones. Here, we show that this addition bias is systematically reflected in English language statistics along several (...) distinct dimensions. First, we show that words associated with an increase in quantity or number (e.g., add, addition, more, most) are more frequent than words associated with a decrease in quantity or number (e.g., subtract, subtraction, less, least). Second, we show that in binomial expressions, addition-related words are mentioned first, that is, add and subtract rather than subtract and add. Third, we show that the distributional semantics of verbs of change, such as to improve and to transform, overlap more with the distributional semantics of add/increase than subtract/decrease, which suggests that change verbs are implicitly biased toward addition. Fourth, addition-related words have more positive connotations than subtraction-related words. Fifth, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3), are also biased toward addition. We discuss the implications of our results for research on cognitive biases and decision-making. (shrink)

Individual differences have been neglected in decision-making research on heuristics and cognitive biases. Addressing that issue requires having reliable measures. The author first reviewed the research on the measurement of individual differences in cognitive biases. While reliable measures of a dozen biases are currently available, our review revealed that some measures require improvement and measures of other key biases are still lacking (e.g., confirmation bias). We then conducted empirical work showing that adjustments produced a significant (...) improvement of some measures and that confirmation bias can be reliably measured. Overall, our review and findings highlight that the measurement of individual differences in cognitive biases is still in its infancy. In particular, we suggest that contextualized (in addition to generic) measures need to be improved or developed. (shrink)

A lot of philosophy taught to science students consists of scientific methodology. But many philosophy of science textbooks have a fraught relationship with methodology, presenting it either a system of universal principles or entirely permeated by contingent factors not subject to normative assessment. In this paper, I argue for an alternative, heuristic perspective for teaching methodology: as fallible, purpose- and context-dependent, subject to cost-effectiveness considerations and systematically biased, but nevertheless subject to normative assessment. My pedagogical conclusion from this perspective is (...) that philosophers should aim to teach science students heuristic reasoning: strategies of normative method choice appraisal that are sensitive to purposes, contexts, biases and cost-effectiveness considerations; and that we should do so by teaching them exemplars of such reasoning. I illustrate this proposal at the hand of three such exemplars, showing how they help students to appreciate the heuristic nature of both methods and methodology, and to normatively assess method choice in such circumstances. (shrink)

Belief bias is the tendency for prior beliefs to influence people's deductive reasoning in two ways: through the application of a simple belief-heuristic and through the application of more effortful reasoning for unbelievable conclusions. Previous research indicates that cognitive ability is the primary determinant of the effect of beliefs on accuracy. In the current study, we show that the mere tendency to engage analytic reasoning is responsible for the effect of cognitive ability on motivated reasoning. The implications of this finding (...) for our understanding of the impact of individual differences on belief bias are discussed. (shrink)

Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore information. In contrast to the widely held view that less processing reduces accuracy, the study of heuristics shows that less information, computation, and time can in fact improve accuracy. We review the major progress made so far: the discovery of less-is-more effects; the study of the ecological rationality of heuristics, which examines in which environments a given strategy succeeds or fails, and why; an advancement from vague labels to computational models (...) of heuristics; the development of a systematic theory of heuristics that identifies their building blocks and the evolved capacities they exploit, and views the cognitive system as relying on an “adaptive toolbox;” and the development of an empirical methodology that accounts for individual differences, conducts competitive tests, and has provided evidence for people’s adaptive use of heuristics. Homo heuristicus has a biased mind and ignores part of the available information, yet a biased mind can handle uncertainty more efficiently and robustly than an unbiased mind relying on more resource-intensive and general-purpose processing strategies. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that the interplay between emotions and cognitive biases influences corporate decision-making on climate change adaptation. Our theoretical analysis examines how emotions can change the effect of cognitive biases on adaptation decisions by influencing how firms select, access, and process complex and uncertain climatic information. We draw on research on climate adaptation, social psychology, and managerial cognition and focus on three forms of bias: availability heuristic, framing, and anchoring. We explain how each bias shapes (...) the decision-making process on adaptation and theorize how emotions of different valence and arousal affect this process. We shed light on the underlying mechanisms that explain how emotions influence the effect of cognitive biases as a source of inaction on adaptation in firms. Our analysis provides a new perspective on how firms approach the strategic decision to adapt to climate change by considering both cognitive and emotional aspects. (shrink)

Patient choice, we might think, is the popular version of the ideas of informed consent and the principle of respect for autonomy and intimately connected to the politics of liberal individualism. There are various accounts to be given for why patient choice, in all its forms, has dominated thinking in bioethics and popular culture. All of them, I suggest, will make reference to the decline of paternalism. The bad old days of ‘doctor knows best’ are gone and were replaced by (...) the primacy of patient choice and informed consent.The response to the dominance of the principle of patient choice has been slow in building but it has come in a number of ways. Two sets of papers in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics show just how far this response has come and the degree to which the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. Neil Levy's Feature article, ‘Forced to be free? Increasing patient autonomy by constraining it’, argues that we should go to greater lengths to correct patients' mistaken decisions . In the ‘Author meets critics’ section, Sarah Conly's book, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism is the focus of comment . Both authors draw on a similar range of empirical evidence to undermine the sanctity of patient and individual choice. An array of commentators draw on these target pieces to give a clear picture of the ways in which the popular view can justifiably be undermined.Levy's paper focuses on the process of informed consent in clinical contexts. He argues that, while this process is crucially important, it systematically fails because of well-documented frailties of human reason. The evidence of these frailties comes from cognitive and social psychology, on biases and heuristics. The key question is how …. (shrink)

Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting biogeochemical cycles and the climate at a global level. We argue that anthropogenically-driven climate change must be understood in terms of a monumental (...) niche construction process, generating long-term ecological inheritance and eco-evolutionary feedbacks that are putting our health and well-being and those of future generations at risk. We then list five major sources of climate change counter-intuitiveness, highlighting how evolved cognitive biases and heuristics may stand in the way of providing effective responses within tight deadlines. Drawing on our framing of the climate breakdown, we finally call for an evolutionary perspective in approaching the adaptive challenge posed by climate change: we argue that putting the brakes on a genuine self-endangering evolutionary trap ultimately depends on our counteractive niche constructing abilities, played at the level of our institutional and innovation capacity. (shrink)

Dual-processes theories of cognition implicitly assume universality of the human mind. However, research has shown that large-scale differences exist in thinking styles across cultures. Thereby, the universality of the effects found in Western samples remains an open empirical question. Here, we explored whether effects predicted by prospect theory, such as the framing effect, would be observed in a sample of 312 Bulgarian students. Overall, the size of the framing effect was smaller than in the original studies. Most notably, we failed (...) to reproduce the framing effect in the famous Asian Disease problem, using a rating response format. In a between-subjects design, decision- making performance was completely independent of university admission grades. We propose that studying the size of the effects across cultures is needed in order to establish the effects’ level of universality. More broadly, we suggest ways in which knowledge of cultural settings can help elaborate or test dual-process predictions. (shrink)

The Adaptive Toolbox framework specifies heuristics for choice and categorisation that search through cues in previously learned orders (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999). We examined the learning of three cue parameters defining different orders: discrimination rate (DR) (the probability that a cue points to a unique choice), validity (the probability of correct choice given that a cue discriminates), and success (the probability of correct choice). Success orderings are identical to those by expected information gain (Klayman & Ha, 1987). In two (...) experiments, participants made choices in real-world environments with objective outcome criteria. Participant ratings indicated some appropriate parameter learning when the relevant cue parameter values were highly dispersed. Rated orders of cue validity and DR were less distinct than the objective orders—learning one parameter may be biased towards success by variation in the other. Success ratings capture the variation in validity and DR as well as participants' perception of these parameters. (shrink)

This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility (...) of optimality considerations, including selective search for confirming vidence, ex post rationalization, and the confusion of prediction with explanation. Commentators are asked to reflect on the extent to which optimality is an organizing principle of nature, a set of relatively unconnected techniques of science, a normative principle for rational choice and social organization, a metaphysical way of looking at the world, or something else still. (shrink)

The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a study of the statistical intuitions of experts, who were found to be excessively confident in the replicability of results from small samples. The persistence of such systematic errors in the intuitions of experts implied that their intuitive judgments may be governed by fundamentally different processes than the slower, more deliberate computations they had been trained to execute. The ancient idea that cognitive processes can (...) be partitioned into two main families--traditionally called intuition and reason--is now widely embraced under the general label of dual-process theories. Dual-process models come in many flavors, but all distinguish cognitive operations that are quick and associative from others that are slow and governed by rules. To represent intuitive and deliberate reasoning, we borrow the terms "system 1" and "system 2" from Stanovich and West. In the following section, we present an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which assumes that difficult questions are often answered by substituting an answer to an easier one. Following sections introduce a research design for studying attribute substitution, as well as discuss the controversy over the representativeness heuristic in the context of a dual-system view that we endorse. The final section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global judgments concerning an entire set. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction: Risk and Emotions -- PART I Risk Debates, Stalemates, Values and Emotions -- 2 Emotions and Values in Current Approaches to Decision Making About Risk -- 3 Risk Perception, Intuitions and Values -- PART II Reasonable Risk Emotions -- 4 Risk Emotions: The 'Affect Heuristic', its Biases and Beyond -- 5 The Philosophy of Moral Risk Emotions: Toward a New Paradigm of Risk Emotions -- PART (...) III Emotional Deliberation About Risk -- 6 Reflection on and with Risk Emotions -- 7 Participation with Emotion -- 8 Emotional Deliberation on Technological Risks in Practice -- Epilogue -- References -- Index. (shrink)