Cognitive Biases

The cognitive bias would be a pattern of deviation in judgment, in which the inferences we make about other people and/or situations can be illogical. To continue understanding more about the phenomenon, in this chapter a complete list of cognitive biases are displayed. Within these cognitive biases, some were produced by the processing of information, social or group influence, heuristics, expectations of the people, personality traits, etc. Furthermore, within the list of cognitive biases, a more exhaustive explanation of the most important studied cognitive biases will be explained. In addition, the author creates a table with an alphabetical list of each cognitive bias found in scientific literature with a brief definition.

Detecting and Avoiding Cognitive Biases

Cognitive biases affect the decision-making process. These cognitive biases can help us to make a right or effective and quick decision, but many times they can produce wrong, illogical, or unfounded decisions or judgments. For this reason, this chapter will describe some programs, games, techniques, and therapies to detect and reduce them. These programs can be used both in the clinical population and healthy population. Therefore, the first step is being aware of our biases and the second step would be doing practical exercises to reduce and avoid them in our decision making. Practicing these exercises does not help us to always choose the right option, but they inhibit the wrong answer.

Cognitive Biases

This chapter will describe some implications of using cognitive biases in the decision-making process in social areas such as economic, legal, education, and political. The cognitive bias would be a pattern of deviation in judgment, in which the inferences that we make about other people and/or situations can be illogical. Moreover, different studies have found that even strategic decisions that affect the society can be influenced by these biases. Therefore, it is important to be aware of them to try to detect and reduce them. Above all, it is necessary to teach how to detect them in order to reduce them in public professionals.

Jumping to Conclusions Bias

Jumping to conclusions bias is a tendency to make decisions with a high level of haste, even taking into account that there is little evidence. The jumping to conclusions bias has been widely associated with patients with schizophrenia, above all, in those patients who have positive symptomatology, that is, delusions. This cognitive bias is involved in the onset, maintenance, and relapse of these positive symptoms in schizophrenia. Also, it has been found in other psychological disorders and in healthy populations, above all in individual with schizotypy personality traits. Due to the extensive study on this cognitive bias, a detailed explanation of it will be carried out in relation to certain psychological disorders, especially schizophrenia. Moreover, the chapter describes recent studies with healthy population to see how it affects the decision-making process.

Cognitive Biases in Clinical Population

Cognitive behavioral models have postulated an important role for most cognitive biases such as attentional biases, memory biases, interpretation biases, or attributional biases in different disorders. However, some cognitive biases have been more strongly evidenced in some mental disorders (eating disorder, phobias, and depression) than other disorders such as in obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar disorder. This chapter describes the relationship between some cognitive biases and some psychological disorders. Specifically, it explains the relationship between them in anxiety, depression, and eating disorders which help to understand the influence of these biases in the onset, maintenance, relapse, and/ or recovery from these mental disorders.

Decision-Making Theoretical Models and Cognitive Biases

Decision making is a cognitive evaluation and selection process on a set of options in order to get to a series of objectives, so the decision-making process is complex. For that, this chapter will talk about the most important decision-making models found in the scientific literature. On the one hand, it will explain the computational models of decision making: connectionist, probabilistic, and qualitative. On the other hand, it will describe the somatic marker model of Damasio and the model of decision making based on heuristics of Kanheman and Tversky. Note that all decision-making models are valid and will depend on the decision in particular that a model will be explanatory of or not. Moreover, some of the models can also act in a complementary way.

Social Cognitive Bias

Within social psychology and sociology there is a field of study in charge of studying how the social group affects the individual in all areas. In fact, several studies have found that the social decision-making process can be influenced by cognitive biases. This fields establishes two large categories of social groups called ingroup and outgroup depending on whether individuals are part of this group or not. Therefore, an ingroup is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an outgroup is a social group with which an individual does not identify. Moreover, the psychological membership of social groups and categories can be related with different aspects such as race, profession, religion, among others, so that individuals can categorize themselves and others in different ways, usually dependent on the context. This categorization that individuals do based in the pertinence to a group and the influence of the group on the person reproduce in the person social cognitive biases that can lead to erroneous decisions. Within these biases the best known is the ingroup bias. This chapter explores some of these social biases and how they influence the decision-making process.

Cognitive Biases by Information Processing

Cognitive biases can be produced by the constraints of information processing, as has been widely studied using different cognitive tasks both in clinical and healthy populations. Furthermore, these biases have been found in different areas of society (legal, economic, education, etc.) whose impact on the decision-making process is important. Often these biases help us make quick and appropriate decisions, but other times they lead to erroneous decisions. Within the cognitive biases due to inadequate processing of information, there are three main groups: perceptional bias, attentional bias, and memory bias. This chapter explains these three groups of cognitive biases. Subsequently, it offers a detailed explanation of some of the cognitive biases that have been studied in the fields of cognitive psychology. Finally, the author creates an alphabetical list of these biases and brief definitions.

Personality Traits and Cognitive Biases

Personality plays an important role in determining one's cognitive style, having a strong impact on the decision making of each person. Personality is a set of traits and qualities that form how somebody is, and it distinguishes us from others. At present, the most widely accepted personality theory is the big five factor, where personality is divided into five large traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits are independent of each other. On the other hand, several personality traits have been more strongly associated with psychopathology. Therefore, personality traits would be related to the production of several cognitive biases in all people because personality influences our own beliefs, and these can guide us to display certain types of biases. This chapter delves into the relationship between personality traits (especially openness, neuroticism, extroversion, and schizotypy) and cognitive biases.