In previous experiments on unconscious thought, information was presented to participants in one continuous session; however, in daily life, information is delivered in a temporally partitioned way. We examined whether unconscious thought could equally integrate temporally scattered information when making overall evaluations. When presenting participants with information in two temporally partitioned sessions, participants’ overall evaluation was based on neither the information in the first session nor that in the second session ; instead, information in (...) both sessions were equally integrated to reach a final judgment. Conscious thought, however, overemphasized information in the second session. Experiments 3 and 4 further ruled out possible influencing factors including differences in the distributions of positive/negative attributes in the first and second sessions and on-line judgment. These findings suggested that unconscious thought can integrate information from a wider range of periods during an evaluation, while conscious thought cannot. (shrink)

We argue that an essential element of understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems requires an analysis of the relation between algorithms and agency. We outline six key ways in which issues of agency, autonomy, and respect for persons can conflict with algorithmic decision-making.

BackgroundHealth data holds great potential for improved treatments. Big data research and machine learning models have been shown to hold great promise for improved diagnostics and treatment planning. The potential is tied, however, to the availability of personal health data. In recent years, it has been argued that data from health records should be available for health research, and that individuals have a duty to make the data available for such research. A central point of debate is whether such secondary (...) use of health data requires informed consent.Main bodyIn response to recent writings this paper argues that a requirement of informed consent for health record research must be upheld. It does so by exploring different contrasting notions of the duty of easy rescue and arguing that none of them entail aperfectduty to participate in health record research. In part because the costs of participation cannot be limited to 1) the threat of privacy breaches, but includes 2) the risk of reduced trust and 3) suboptimal treatment, 4) stigmatization and 5) medicalisation, 6) further stratification of solidarity and 7) increased inequality in access to treatment and medicine. And finally, it defends the requirement of informed consent by arguing that the mere possibility of consent bias provides a rather weak reason for making research participation mandatory, and that there are strong, independent reasons for making.ConclusionArguments from the duty of easy rescue in combination with claims about little risk of harm and potential consent bias fail to establish not only aperfectduty to participate in health record research, but also that participation in such research should be mandatory. On the contrary, an analysis of these arguments indicates that the duty to participate in research is most adequately construed as animperfectduty, and reveals a number of strong reasons for insisting that participation in health records research is based on informed consent. (shrink)

An experiment is reported which tests for positive confirmation bias in a setting in which individuals choose what information to buy, prior to making a decision. The design – an adaptation of Wason's selection task – reveals the use that subjects make of information after buying it. Strong evidence of positive confirmation bias, in both information acquisition and information use, is found; and this bias is found to be robust to experience. It is (...) suggested that the bias results from a pattern of reasoning which, although producing sub-optimal decisions, is internally coherent and which is self-reinforcing. (shrink)

The increasing debate on corporate ethics raises the question of whether consumers are willing to reward and punish corporate behaviour based on its ethicality. In this context, this article investigates the direct effect on consumers' willingness to pay. Price response to product-related ethical information is explored in an experiment dealing with social issues in sportswear and environmental issues in consumer electronics. It is shown that in both areas, consumers demonstrate an increased willingness to pay for ethically produced goods. However, (...) the response is subject to a negativity bias. In contrast to prior research that used abstract stimulus measures, a ratio for quantifying this bias is suggested based on consumers' willingness to pay and their price expectations. This measure allows us to analyse a consumer's individual bias. (shrink)

In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that the mechanisms that produce belief bias generalise across reasoning tasks. In formal reasoning (i.e., syllogisms) judgements of validity are influenced by actual validity, believability of the conclusions, and an interaction between the two. Although apparently analogous effects of belief and argument strength have been observed in informal reasoning, the design of those studies does not permit an analysis of the interaction effect. In the present studies we redesigned two informal reasoning tasks: (...) the Argument Evaluation Task (AET) and a Law of Large Numbers (LLN) task in order to test the similarity of the phenomena concerned. Our findings provide little support for the idea that belief bias on formal and informal reasoning is a unitary phenomenon. First, there was no correlation across individuals in the extent of belief bias shown on the three tasks. Second, evidence for belief by strength interaction was observed only on AET and under conditions not required for the comparable finding on syllogistic reasoning. Finally, we found that while conclusion believability strongly influenced assessments of arguments strength, it had a relatively weak influence on the verbal justifications offered on the two informal reasoning tasks. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large‐scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and (...) negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals. (shrink)

Gender bias in leadership and decision-making is a well-documented and pervasive topic that continues to garner significant attention in academic research and business literature. In this paper, by exploiting a unique proprietary dataset of 550 mid-corporate loan applications managed by a major European bank, we explore how the use of soft information influences lending decisions of female loan officers as compared to their male counterparts. We find that use of soft information reduces information asymmetry which helps (...) female officers in making diligent lending decisions resulting in increased granted credit with a lower default probability. We also investigate gender affinity within the banking organisation and find that female loan approvers are more likely to be supportive of their subordinate female loan officers by approving more credit to the loan applications handled by female loan officers. Finally, we examine the possible mechanisms that can explain these results, and find that female loan officers are able to better collect and use soft information as they cultivate and maintain deeper firm-bank relationships with their clients due to higher threat of losing or being penalized in their jobs for any possible errors. We also rule out any other possible explanations such as differences in workload, work experience, loan officers’ optimism, managerial ability, and screening capabilities between female and male loan officers. Our findings carry important policy implications, reflected in the optimal allocation of capital in the economy and the reduction of gender-related exclusion, which is vital in creating an equitable society and fostering a more ethical and inclusive workplace. (shrink)

Confirmation bias is often used as an umbrella term for many related phenomena. Information searches, evidence interpretation, and memory recall are the three main components of the thinking proces...

The growing number of refugees entering Europe since 2015 has quickly ignited a heated public debate on refugees in Germany. Against the backdrop of the media’s information and opinion-forming function, this paper examines the importance of mainstream and social media among different segments of the German population. Applying cluster analysis to survey data, six clusters with specific attitude-behavior combinations concerning the refugee issue were identified: Pro-Refugee Activists, Passive-Affirmative Mainstream, Directly-Involved Ambivalents, Passive-Worried Mainstream, Worried Agitators, and Anti-Refugee Activists. The results (...) show that these clusters differ both in terms of socio-demographic and political characteristics as well as in terms of people’s issue-specific media usage, expectations, and evaluations of media coverage. Moreover, the findings indicate that social media play a problematic role in the debate as they seem to reinforce people’s pre-existing attitudes toward refugees. The implications of these findings for public debate on refugees are also discussed. (shrink)

Online information intermediaries such as Facebook and Google are slowly replacing traditional media channels thereby partly becoming the gatekeepers of our society. To deal with the growing amount of information on the social web and the burden it brings on the average user, these gatekeepers recently started to introduce personalization features, algorithms that filter information per individual. In this paper we show that these online services that filter information are not merely algorithms. Humans not only affect (...) the design of the algorithms, but they also can manually influence the filtering process even when the algorithm is operational. We further analyze filtering processes in detail, show how personalization connects to other filtering techniques, and show that both human and technical biases are present in today’s emergent gatekeepers. We use the existing literature on gatekeeping and search engine bias and provide a model of algorithmic gatekeeping. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical exploration of bias and our practices of attributing it. It develops and defends the norm-theoretic account of bias, according to which objectionable biases involve systematic departures from objective norms or standards of correctness. It explores the perspectival character of bias attributions, or the ways in which our views about which people and sources of information are biased about a topic are influenced and constrained, both rationally and psychologically, by our views about (...) the topic itself. The book defends a robust pluralism about bias, according to which a radical diversity of things are genuinely biased, with none of these more fundamental than all of the rest. Biases of people are understood as multiply realizable dispositions to depart from objective norms. It offers a novel account of the bias blind spot, or our tendency to fail to see bias in ourselves in a way that we see it in others. It explores the connections between bias and central topics in the theory of knowledge, including truth, knowledge, rationality, reliability, introspection, skepticism, and disagreement. A number of racial conclusions are defended: that both rationality and morality sometimes require us to be biased; that in many cases of disagreement, we are rationally required to view those who disagree with us as biased, even if we know nothing about how they arrived at their views or why they hold them; and that even God could not have made us reliable detectors of our own biases through introspection. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe negativity bias is the tendency for individuals to give greater weight, and often exhibit more rapid and extreme responses, to negative than positive information. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott illusory memory paradigm, the current study sought to examine how the negativity bias might affect both correct recognition for negative and positive words and false recognition for associated critical lures, as well as how trait neuroticism might moderate these effects. In two experiments, participants studied lists of words composed of (...) semantic associates of an unpresented word. Half of the lists were comprised of positive words and half were comprised of negative words. As expected, individuals remembered negative list words better than positive list words, consistent with a negativity bias in correct recognition. When tested immediately, individuals also exhibited greater false memory for negative versus positive critical lures. When tested after a 24-hr delay... (shrink)

Research has demonstrated that people readily pay more attention to negative than to positive and/or neutral stimuli. However, evidence from recent studies indicated that such an attention bias to negative information is not obligatory but sensitive to various factors. Two experiments using intergroup evaluative tasks (Study 1: a gender-related groups evaluative task and Study 2: a minimal-related groups evaluative task) was conducted to determine whether motivation to strive for a positive social identity - a part of one's self-concept (...) - drives attention toward affective stimuli. Using the P1 component of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a neural index of attention, we confirmed that attention bias toward negative stimuli is not mandatory but it can depend on a motivational focus on affective outcomes. Results showed that social identity-based motivation is likely to bias attention toward affectively incongruent information. Thereby, early onset processes - reflected by the P1 component - appeared susceptible to top-down attentional influences induced by the individual's motivation to strive for a positive social identity. (shrink)

The sunk cost cognitive bias, or sunk cost fallacy, is a human tendency to continue with: an investment, make a decision, business, couple or project based on the resources that have been invested, instead of making a current evaluation of the results. future benefits and costs. The objective of the research was to analyze the impact of sunk cost cognitive bias on customer decisions and its application in neuromarketing strategies. The specific objectives were: (i) Evaluate how sunk cost (...) influences the perception of the value of products or services. (ii) Identify marketing strategies that exploit the sunk cost bias. (iii) Propose strategies to apply the sunk cost bias in marketing. The results show that the sunk cost bias significantly influences the perception of the value of products and services, affecting purchasing decisions, depending on the educational level, gender, and income level that influence the continuity in the use of products and services. due to previous investment of time or money; When purchasing expensive items customers feel obligated to continue using paid more even if it is not useful and used in full. The continuity in prepaid subscriptions, the perception of discounts for large quantities as a way to make better use of money, the probability of participating in loyalty programs for the accumulated rewards, the preference for payments and flexible cancellation, create a valuable perception of products they have previously invested in, the preference for repairing expensive items, and the perception of loss from a previous investment. It is concluded that the sunk cost cognitive bias significantly influences the decisions and behavior of a vast majority of customers, and how companies can use this information to design effective marketing campaigns. (shrink)

_Anthropic Bias_ explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as "the anthropic principle," "self-locating belief," or "indexical information"--turns out to be a surprisingly perplexing and intellectually stimulating challenge, one abounding with important implications for many areas in science and philosophy. There are the philosophical thought experiments and (...) paradoxes: the Doomsday Argument; Sleeping Beauty; the Presumptuous Philosopher; Adam & Eve; the Absent-Minded Driver; the Shooting Room. And there are the applications in contemporary science: cosmology ; evolutionary theory ; the problem of time's arrow ; quantum physics ; game-theory problems with imperfect recall ; even traffic analysis. _Anthropic Bias_ argues that the same principles are at work across all these domains. And it offers a synthesis: a mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects that attempts to meet scientific needs while steering clear of philosophical paradox. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The term ‘publication bias’ usually refers to the tendency for a greater proportion of statistically significant positive results of experiments to be published and, conversely, a greater proportion of statistically significant negative or null results not to be published. It is widely accepted in the fields of healthcare and psychological research to be a major threat to the validity of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Some methodological work has previously been undertaken, by the author and others, in the field (...) of educational research to investigate the extent of the problem. This paper describes the problem of publication bias with reference to its history in a number of fields, with special reference to the area of educational research. Informal methods for detecting publication bias in systematic reviews and meta-analyses of controlled trials are outlined and retrospective and prospective methods for dealing with the problem are suggested. (shrink)

Faces are complex stimuli that can be described via intuitive facial features like the eyes, nose, and mouth, “configural” features like the distances between facial landmarks, and features that correspond to computations performed in the early visual system (e.g. oriented edges). With regard to this latter category of descriptors, adult face recognition relies disproportionately on information in specific spatial frequency and orientation bands: Many recognition tasks are performed more accurately when adults have access to mid-range spatial frequencies (8-16 cycles/face) (...) and horizontal orientations (Dakin & Watt, 2009). In the current study, we examined how this information bias develops in middle childhood. We recruited children between the ages of 5-10 years old to participate in a simple categorization task that required them to label images according to whether they depicted a face or a house. Critically, children were presented with face and house images comprised either of primarily horizontal orientation energy, primarily vertical orientation energy, or both horizontal and vertical orientation energy. We predicted that any bias favoring horizontal information over vertical should be more evident in faces than in houses, and also that older children would be more likely to show such a bias than younger children. We designed our categorization task to be sufficiently easy that children would perform at near-ceiling accuracy levels, but with variation in response times that would reflect how they rely on different orientations as a function of age and object category. We found that horizontal bias for face detection (but not house detection) correlated significantly with age, suggesting an emergent category-specific bias for horizontal orientation energy that develops during middle childhood. These results thus suggest that the tuning of high-level recognition to specific low-level visual features takes take place over several years of visual development. (shrink)

This commentary provides a brief overview of the methods and results presented by Jennifer Kuzma, Pouya Najmaie, and Joel Larson in “Evaluating Oversight Systems for Emerging Technologies: A Case Study of Genetically Engineered Organisms.” It offers suggestions regarding how supplemental information might be used to gain additional insights into the authors' results and how future research could further enhance our understanding of the attributes and outcomes of regulatory oversight for genetically engineered organisms.

Confirmation bias has been widely studied for its role in failures of reasoning. Individuals exhibiting confirmation bias fail to engage with information that contradicts their current beliefs, and, as a result, can fail to abandon inaccurate beliefs. But although most investigations of confirmation bias focus on individual learning, human knowledge is typically developed within a social structure. We use network models to show that moderate confirmation bias often improves group learning. However, a downside is that (...) a stronger form of confirmation bias can hurt the knowledge producing capacity of the community. (shrink)

If two stimuli need different times to be processed, this difference should in principle be reflected both by response times (RT) and by judgments of their temporal order (TOJ). However, several dissociations have been reported between RT and TOJ, e.g., RT is more affected than TOJ when stimulus intensity decreases. One account for these dissociations is to assume differences in the allocation of attention induced by the two tasks. To test this hypothesis, different distributions of attention were induced in the (...) present study between two stimulus positions (above and below fixation). Only bright stimuli appeared in one position and either bright or dim stimuli in the other. In the two RT experiments, participants had to respond to every stimulus appearing in one of the two positions. Reaction times to bright stimuli were faster when they appeared in the position where dim stimuli were likely to occur. This finding suggests that the allocation of attention was adapted to the asymmetrical arrangement of stimuli, not suggested by explicit instruction. In the two TOJ experiments, the temporal order of stimuli appearing in the two positions had to be judged. Although bright stimuli appearing at the bright-and-dim location were judged to be earlier, this effect was small and insignificant. Further, the intensity dissociation between RT and TOJ was insensitive to random vs blockwise presentations of intensities, therefore was not modified by attentional preferences. Thus, asymmetrical arrangement of stimuli has an impact on the allocation of attention, but only in the RT task. Therefore dissociations between TOJ and response times cannot be accounted for by an attentional bias in the TOJ task but probably by different use of temporal information in the two tasks. (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)

This research is an extension of Walker Information’s (Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases, pp. 235–255, 1999) study on employees’ job attitudes that was conducted exclusively in the United States. Walker Information found that the reputation of the organization, fairness at work, care, and concern for employees, trust in employees, and resources available at work were important factors in an employee’s decision to remain with his or her company. Our sample includes 713 students from seven countries: Canada, (...) Colombia, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States. When analyzing the entire sample, our data indicate that both social desirability response bias and gender were significant; however, this was not the case when the data are analyzed by country. On an individual country basis, our data suggest that the generally accepted premise that women are more ethically conscious than men was only true for the samples from the United States and Canada. The data also indicate that, while social desirability response bias was significant for the four factors suggesting ethical components for the sample from the United States, this finding was not universal. (shrink)

In response to reports on embryonic stem cell research in the AMWA Journal, the official publication of the American Medical Writers Association, the author submitted a brief article discussing ethical objections to such research. The Journal editor rejected the article, saying the Journal was not an appropriate place to discuss the ethics of stem cell research. The author challenged this reasoning because the Journal is committed to informing members about relevant ethical issues, ethics were mentioned in one of the original (...) reports, and related ethical concerns were discussed in a previous issue. Further efforts to secure balanced reporting failed. Concerned professionals should be aware of the AMWA bias. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 8.4 (Winter 2008): 639–654. (shrink)

To analyze which ethically relevant biases have been identified by academic literature in artificial intelligence algorithms developed either for patient risk prediction and triage, or for contact tracing to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, to specifically investigate whether the role of social determinants of health have been considered in these AI developments or not. We conducted a scoping review of the literature, which covered publications from March 2020 to April 2021. ​Studies mentioning biases on AI algorithms developed for contact (...) tracing and medical triage or risk prediction regarding COVID-19 were included. From 1054 identified articles, 20 studies were finally included. We propose a typology of biases identified in the literature based on bias, limitations and other ethical issues in both areas of analysis. Results on health disparities and SDOH were classified into five categories: racial disparities, biased data, socio-economic disparities, unequal accessibility and workforce, and information communication. SDOH needs to be considered in the clinical context, where they still seem underestimated. Epidemiological conditions depend on geographic location, so the use of local data in studies to develop international solutions may increase some biases. Gender bias was not specifically addressed in the articles included. The main biases are related to data collection and management. Ethical problems related to privacy, consent, and lack of regulation have been identified in contact tracing while some bias-related health inequalities have been highlighted. There is a need for further research focusing on SDOH and these specific AI apps. (shrink)

In recent decades, economists have developed methods for measuring the country-wide level of inequality of opportunity. The most popular method, called the ex-ante method, uses data on the distribution of outcomes stratified by groups of individuals with the same circumstances, in order to estimate the part of outcome inequality that is due to these circumstances. I argue that these methods are potentially biased, both upwards and downwards, and that the unknown size of this bias could be large. To argue (...) that the methods are biased, I show that they ought to measure causal or counterfactual quantities, while the methods are only capable of identifying correlational information. To argue that the bias is potentially large, I illustrate how the causal complexity of the real world leads to numerous non-causal correlations between circumstances and outcomes and respond to objections claiming that such correlations are nonetheless indicators of unfair disadvantage, that is, inequality of opportunity. (shrink)

It is well-known that dichotomization can cause bias and loss of efficiency in estimation. One can easily construct examples where adjusting for a dichotomized confounder causes bias in causal estimation. There are additional examples in the literature where adjusting for a dichotomized confounder can be more biased than not adjusting at all. The message is clear, do not dichotomize. What is unclear is if there are scenarios where adjusting for the dichotomized confounder always leads to lower bias (...) than not adjusting. We propose several sets of conditions that characterize scenarios where one should always adjust for the dichotomized confounder to reduce bias. We then highlight scenarios where the decision to adjust should be made more cautiously. To our knowledge, this is the first formal presentation of conditions that give information about when one should and potentially should not adjust for a dichotomized confounder. (shrink)

An ad hominem fallacy is committed when an individual employs an irrelevant personal attack against an opponent instead of addressing that opponent’s argument. Many discussions of such fallacies discuss judgments of relevance about such personal attacks, and consider how we might distinguish those that are relevant from those that are not. This paper will argue that the literature on bias and testimony can helpfully contribute to that analysis. This will highlight ways in which biases, particularly unconscious biases, can make (...) ad hominem fallacies seem effective, even when the irrelevance is recognized. (shrink)

Often machine learning programs inherit social patterns reflected in their training data without any directed effort by programmers to include such biases. Computer scientists call this algorithmic bias. This paper explores the relationship between machine bias and human cognitive bias. In it, I argue similarities between algorithmic and cognitive biases indicate a disconcerting sense in which sources of bias emerge out of seemingly innocuous patterns of information processing. The emergent nature of this bias obscures (...) the existence of the bias itself, making it difficult to identify, mitigate, or evaluate using standard resources in epistemology and ethics. I demonstrate these points in the case of mitigation techniques by presenting what I call ‘the Proxy Problem’. One reason biases resist revision is that they rely on proxy attributes, seemingly innocuous attributes that correlate with socially-sensitive attributes, serving as proxies for the socially-sensitive attributes themselves. I argue that in both human and algorithmic domains, this problem presents a common dilemma for mitigation: attempts to discourage reliance on proxy attributes risk a tradeoff with judgement accuracy. This problem, I contend, admits of no purely algorithmic solution. (shrink)

Researchers increasingly rely on large data sets of health information, often linked with biological specimens. In recent years, the argument has been made that obtaining informed consent for conducting records-based research is unduly burdensome and results in ?consent bias.? As a type of selection bias, consent bias is said to exist when the group giving researchers access to their data differs from the group denying access. Therefore, to promote socially beneficial research, it is argued that consent (...) should be unnecessary. After analyzing the biostatistics evidence and bioethics arguments, the article concludes that (1) claims about the amount of consent bias are overstated; (2) commonly used statistical methods usually can account for consent bias; and (3) any residual effects of consent bias are below an acceptable level of imprecision and constitute a reasonable social cost for conducting ethically responsible research. (shrink)

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from (...) the main goal of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members and generic facts about entire kinds. Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind, and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic. We predicted that—because of the hypothesized bias—participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified-to-generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable-versus-idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds. (shrink)

Individuals with high anxiety show bias for threatening information, but it is unclear whether this bias affects memory. Recognition memory studies have shown biases for recognising and rejecting threatening items in anxiety, prompting the need to identify moderating factors of this effect. This study focuses on the role of semantic similarity: the use of many semantically related threatening words could increase familiarity for those items and obscure anxiety-related differences in memory. To test this, two recognition memory experiments (...) varied the proportion of threatening words in lists to manipulate the semantic-similarity effects. When similarity effects were reduced, participants with high trait anxiety were biased to respond “new” to threatening words, whereas when similarity effects were strong there was no effect of anxiety on memory bias. Analysis of the data with the drift diffusion model showed that the bias was due to differences in processing of the threatening stimuli rather than a simple response bias. These data suggest that the semantic similarity of the threatening words significantly affects the presence or absence of anxiety-related threat bias in recognition memory. The results indicate that trait anxiety is associated with a bias to decide that threatening stimuli were not previously studied, but only when semantic-similarity effects are controlled. Implications for theories of anxiety and future studies in this domain are discussed. (shrink)

The rational status of the Bayesian calculus for revising likelihoods is compromised by the common but still unfamiliar phenomenon of information distortion. This bias is the distortion in the evaluation of a new datum toward favoring the currently preferred option in a decision or judgment. While the Bayesian calculus requires the independent combination of the prior probability and a new datum, information distortion invalidates such independence (because the prior influences the datum). Although widespread, information distortion has (...) not generally been recognized. First, individuals are not aware when they themselves commit this bias. In addition, it is often hidden in more obvious suboptimal phenomena. Finally, the Bayesian calculus is usually explained only with undistortable data like colored balls drawn randomly. Partly because information distortion is unrecognized by the individuals exhibiting it, no way has been devised for eliminating it. Partial reduction is possible in some situation such as presenting all data simultaneously rather than sequentially with revision after each datum. The potential dangers of information distortion are illustrated for three professional revision tasks: forecasting, predicting consumer choices from internet data, and statistical inference from experimental results. The optimality of the Bayesian calculus competes with people’s natural desire that their belief systems remain coherent in the face of new data. Information distortion provides this coherence by biasing those data toward greater agreement with the currently preferred position – but at the cost of Bayesian optimality. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual (...) learning is beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. (shrink)