Cognitive Biases Flashcards
What is Temporal Discounting?
Human propensity to bias the value of a reward received now much higher than if it were received later.
Why does Temporal Discounting happen?
In primitive times, survival was not guaranteed, so one had to focus their efforts on short-term gain and let the long-term take care of itself.
What is Loss Aversion Bias?
Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains.
Why does Loss Aversion Bias happen?
Additonal resources are helpful, but losing resources was very, very risky.
What is Anchoring?
Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered (considered to be the “anchor”) when making decisions.
Why does Anchoring happen?
Combining the facts that the brain needs to organize information and that the first observation of an event has the highest probability of being the norm of that event, the brain can capture a wide amount of information by setting that first impression as the anchor, then grouping the remaining information into deviations from that anchor.
What is Serial Positioning?
This is the human tendency to remember the first and last items in a series, but rarely the middle items.
Why does Serial Positioning happen?
Because recalling memories takes a lot of energy, the brain has optimized over time by maximizing recall for the first piece of information, then trusting future information will be cued from there.
What is Primacy?
We typically remember earlier events than recent events.
Why does Primacy happen?
All recent experinces are encoded into the short-term memory, but important and rehearsed memories will be encoded into long-term memory, where the remaining memories are simply forgotten.
What is the Ambiguity Effect?
The Ambiguity Effect is what happens when you are presented with a decision in which you lack information or have ambiguous information.
Why does the Ambiguity Effect happen?
In the absence of information where threat of death was around every corner, humans were rewarded by avoiding these situations where uncertainty was present.
What is the Law of the instrument?
Cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool.
Why does the Law of the instrument happen?
In prehistoric times, if something kept you alive and provided some great utility, it was worth using over something else that may or may not provide better utility.
What is Reward and Punishment Super-Response Tendency?
We exhibit behavior that was rewarded in the past and avoided behavior that was punished, regardless of the objective value of these behaviors. As a result people are biased toward behaviors that are rewarded or punished.
