Cognitive Bias
Kenneth Taylor

15 July 2017
Aristotle defined humans as the rational animal. But he was wrong! The human mind is riddled with cognitive biases. At last count, there are something like 150 named cognitive biases—confirmation bias, in group bias, loss aversion, the Ikea effect, the halo effect, endowment effects. And every time you turn around, some clever psychologist is naming a new one. But whatever you name them, cognitive biases are a problem. They distort gender relations, racial relations, employment, education, politics, even science. And we’re mostly not even aware of them! That makes them very hard to correct. Indeed, it is not at all obvious that we can correct them. They may, in fact, be entirely beyond our control.
这里有一个认知偏见的例子。以一组教师为例。把他们随机分成两组。给每个小组一套完全相同的论文来打分。把非裔美国人发音的名字放在一组，盎格鲁发音的名字放在另一组。非裔美国人发音的名字比盎格鲁发音的名字成绩要低。在你得出结论，老师只是偏执狂之前，你应该知道，你得到的结果是相同的，对所有不同类型的人，包括世界上最开放的思想的人，那种坚持他们永远不会故意歧视任何人。我们都患有这种内隐的认知偏见:黑人、白人、男性、女性。没关系。
现在想想我们应该如何克服我们的认知偏见。我们的老师。也许我们应该指导他们更加努力，像激光一样专注于他们拿到的论文的质量，并共同努力排除外部因素。如果你给老师这样的指导，他们实际上会努力去遵循。但具有讽刺意味的是，对于一些认知偏见来说，尝试实际上可能会让情况变得更糟。尝试会让你觉得自己成功了。一旦你认为你已经成功地消除了偏见，你可能会对自己说:“看，妈妈!不再有偏见。”这可能会让你想，“这就是我的想法，我没有偏见，所以它一定是真的!”这种努力诱发的认知偏差甚至有一个聪明的名字。 It’s called the “I think it, therefore it’s true” effect. The point is that we can’t just will our biases away. That’s because many of them are the result of unconscious mechanism that are beyond the reach of our conscious control.
你可能认为教育和培训会有所帮助。但是，把教育和培训当成治愈我们认知偏见的良方是没有道理的。事实上，受过高等教育和训练的科学家仍然受到认知偏见的困扰。他们甚至受到科学研究特有的认知偏见的困扰。这表明，人世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区类认知的任何领域都不受认知偏差的影响。这也包括我们这些理性的哲学家。
Before we throw up our hands in despair and conclude that the mind is just a junkyard littered with cognitive biases, it’s important to realize that the mind is also the product of evolution. And evolution doesn’t do junkyards. It does beneficial adaptations. And though cognitive biases may seem the very opposite of beneficial to us now, back in the day, on the Pleistocene savannah, they played a very adaptive role. In those circumstances, if you took time to consider things from all angles, you wouldn’t survive. As a consequence, natural selection designed our brains to make quick and dirty decisions on the fly. Sure, they didn’t always yield the truth. But they helped to keep our forebears alive. This means that perhaps we should regard our cognitive biases as features rather than bugs!
The problem with this line is that we’re not on the Savannah any more. Quick and dirty reasoning may have been good enough for hunter gatherers, but won’t necessarily cut it in our much more complex environment. To thrive in today’s world, we need to “debias” our minds—evolution be damned! Not that that would be an easy task. But it may not be as hard as one might think. Take those teachers. They can debias just by anonymizing student papers. That doesn’t take Herculean effort. And it doesn’t take a lot of education either.
We shouldn’t let that fact make us think that there will necessarily be similar easy fixes in all cases. That would show display another kind of cognitive bias—what’s called optimism bias. But you don’t have to suffer from optimism bias, to think that if we take our biases one at a time and try to think of piecemeal strategies for overcoming them, we might just get somewhere, at least with some of them. We’d love to have you join us as we strategize together about ways of overcoming our many cognitive biases.

Comments(4)

David99999's picture

David99999

Saturday, January 27, 2018 -- 11:45 PM

Some good-old-fashioned

一些传统的正念可能有助于对抗偏见。

Tim Smith's picture

Tim Smith

Monday, December 16, 2019 -- 4:33 AM

That would be mindfulness

That would be mindfulness bias.
Funny ... but not so funny.

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Friday, December 13, 2019 -- 10:26 AM

Good point, David. Oh, that

Good point, David. Oh, that it could be true for more of us. My take on this is as follows:

It is rare to find mindfulness among those who suffer from a lack of mind fullness.

我在某个地方写过——可能是在PT博客上的一篇文章的评论中。关于这篇文章以及之前的一篇文章，我认为认知偏差是一种习得行为，进一步说，它可能构成了一种信念，让人从一开始就怀疑它。最近电视上出现了很多认知偏见，尤其是与政府的行为有关的。这也可以被称为面对党派之争而否认事实。一个人的事实是另一个人的虚构。所以，西蒙满怀同情地写道:……男人只听他想听的，而忽略其他的……

Tim Smith's picture

Tim Smith

Wednesday, December 18, 2019 -- 7:12 AM

Bias is not what Ken thought

Bias is not what Ken thought it was.

David and Harold, alike, can use their reasoning until the cows come home they will still have the threat of bias in their thought, without any real resource to justify their stoicism.

在这个问题上，露丝·米利肯是我的向导。她提出了一些见解和论点，提出了建筑和自然的概念。

我对我所不知道的东西有了概念。独角兽是一个好的开始。

Cognitive bias is a construct of concepts but most certainly a unified structure of two or more concepts.

The placebo effect, salience and recency are not cognitive bias - but that opens up the problem. I can't finish that here.

I am with Harold and David99999... there is a problem here.