Tversky and Kahneman explained human differences in judgment and decision-making in terms of heuristics. Tversky, Kahneman, and colleagues demonstrated several replicable ways in which human judgments and decisions differ from rational choice theory. The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972 and grew out of their experience of people's innumeracy, or inability to reason intuitively with the greater orders of magnitude. 6 Individual differences in cognitive biases.5 Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases.Daniel Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue that cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance, and management. Ī continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Other cognitive biases are a 'by-product' of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms ( bounded rationality), the impact of an individual's constitution and biological state (see embodied cognition), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics.

Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Īlthough it may seem like such misperceptions would be aberrations, biases can help humans find commonalities and shortcuts to assist in the navigation of common situations in life. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Individuals create their own 'subjective reality' from their perception of the input.

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.

Affinity bias definition