Big Biases

From the summary description of the IARPA "Sirius" research project, six major cognitive flaws that minds are subject to, and that tend to cause people to make mistakes in their judgments:

• Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. Often preceded by priming.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (also called attribution bias).
• Bias Blind Spot: The tendency for an individual to be unaware of their own cognitive biases, even when the individual can recognize cognitive biases in others.
• Anchoring Bias: The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (related to focalism or focusing illusion).
• Representativeness Bias: The tendency for people to judge the probability or frequency of a hypothesis by considering how much the hypothesis resembles available data. Also sometimes referred to as the "small numbers" bias.
• Projection Bias: The tendency to unconsciously assume that others share one's current emotional states, thoughts and values.

(cf. Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases, ...) - ^z - 2014-01-09