Toward a synthesis of cognitive biases: How noisy information processing can bias human decision making.

“Kahneman and Tversky (1982) referred to these modes of judgment as singular and distributional, respectively, and argued that frequency estimates usually provide more accurate results than estimates based on singular belief assessments (see also Tversky and Koehler, 1994).”

“Because the mind’s information processing capacity is biologically limited (for example, we possess neither infinite nor photographic memory), we get the feeling of being overwhelmed by the number of choices and end up with ‘‘bounded rationality’’ (Hilbert 2012).”

“Much of what people believe to be true is incomplete, biased, or worse, totally incorrect (Gilovich & Griffin, 2010; Hilbert, 2012).”

“Research on individual information processing failures has a long history in organization studies (for a recent review see Hilbert, 2012), while the area of TIP failures is receiving more research attention in the last decades.”

“There is a variety of evidence that shows that cognitive bias causes inappropriate decisions (Busenitz & Barney, 1997; Hilbert, 2012).”

“…Galesic, Olsson, & Rieskamp, 2012; Kruger, 1999; Kruger, Windschitl, Burrus, Fessel, & Chambers, 2008; Moore & Healy, 2008; Moore & Small, 2007; Roy, Liersch, & Broomell, 2013; on the false uniqueness/false consensus effect seeGalesic,Olsson,&Rieskamp,2013;moregenerally, see also,Hilbert, 2012).”

“Consider, for example, the “subadditivity effect” bias (Hilbert 2012).”

“Thus, the individual honestly believes his or her own performance is superior to that of others (Hilbert, 2012).”

“This pattern is sometimes referred to as underconfidence in people’s probability estimates (see Erev et al., 1994, Hilbert, 2012, for a review).”

“However, cognitive biases can be generated by phenomena other than system one thinking, including emotion [41], social influences [42] and noisy information processing [43].”

“…biases have been described that can affect qualitative-retrospective accounts, including forgetting information, absentmindedness, blocking specific memories, misattribution, suggestibility, retrospective biases, and persistence of intrusive thoughts (Schacter, 1999; see also Hilbert, 2012).”

“…information processing (e.g., Birch & Bloom, 2004; Evans, 1989; Fiedler, 1996, 2000; Gawronski & Strack, 2012; Gilovich, 1991; Griffin & Ross, 1991; Hilbert, 2012; Klayman & Ha, 1987; Kruglanski et al., 2012; Kunda, 1990; Lord & Taylor, 2009; Pronin et al., 2004; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987;…”

“Biases can be the result of time-limited information processing (Hilbert, 2012), heuristic decision making (Simon, 1956), or emotional influences (e.g., wishful thinking, Babad and Katz, 1991; Loewenstein and Lerner, 2003).”

“Probability judgments for these events are formed by recalling these events with some error, which can generate conjunction fallacies (Costello, 2009; Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994; Hilbert, 2012 provide related noise-based accounts of judgment bias).”

“Indeed, many have argued that there is a cognitive mechanism that regresses people’s estimates toward .5 (Costello & Watts, 2014; Dougherty, Gettys, & Ogden, 1999; Erev et al., 1994; Hilbert, 2012).”

“What drives humans much more are emotions and related images which are vulnerable to numerous human cognitive biases [20], such as prejudices against novel ideas.”

“…in the other provisions, especially considering that automation bias is just one of many relevant biases (e.g., hindsight bias, confidence bias [36, 66]), heuristics (e.g., availability heuristic [83]), and other psychological phenomena (e.g., exhaustion, motivation [68, 73]) that would need…”

“INTRODUCTION An abundance of research shows humans are capable of a wide range of cognitive biases (Pronin, 2007; Hilbert, 2012), and that perception is not simply a passive process but instead is shaped by many factors including individual expectations, beliefs and memories (Allport, 1955).”

“…listen carefully but nevertheless, given the design of the human brain, interpret what they hear through their own cognitive architecture (see Hilbert, 2012, for a review of over six decades of research on cognitive biases; also see Howerton, 2017 for review of biases in medical decision…”

“However, a plethora of different cognitive biases have been identified to date (Hilbert 2012), and for many cognitive biases, it is still unclear whether or how they may affect crowd workers.”

“…discusses how the work of artists at this time in Vienna B sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera … [and] turned the artist ’ s view inward — away from the three-dimensional outside world and toward the multidimensional inner self ^ (Kandel, 2012: 4; also see Kandel, 2013).”

“This gives rise to a form of “conservatism” in which probabilities greater than 1/2 are underestimated, and probabilities less than 1/2 are overestimated (Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994; Hilbert, 2012).”

“Hilbert (2012) reviewed a range of cognitive biases that can be similarly explained and shows how each of these biases can be formally derived from one common model.”

“The psychological research on conservatism indicates that such beliefs can be difficult to change in some circumstances, despite the provision of base rate information (Hilbert, 2012).”

“However, to the extent that decisions are influenced by noise, computational failures, and other perturbations (see Costello & Watts, 2014; Hilbert, 2012), adaptive error management is also likely to entail trade-offs between different aspects of robustness/fragility.”

“For example, in the area of judgment and decision-making, Hilbert (2012) explored how a model of randomness (as unbiased noisy estimation) could explain several judgment regularities that had previously been attributed to cognitive biases by developing a formal model from which all regularities…”

“and can be attributed to the effort to handle noisy input signals [26].”

“Some scholars identify as many as 53 different kinds of cognitive biases that contribute to difficulties in inferential thinking [60] (see also [35] for a survey of the literature).”

“For example, in the experiments reported by Huber et al. (1982) the dimensions included the price and quality of beer. In the Wedell (1991) experiments participants were offered options with numeric probability and value features.”

“Another challenge is subjectivity and bias of the decision makers [41].”

“…are transformations of explicitly presented probabilities that demonstrate aversion to extremes (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), and there are other approaches that also assume that noisy processing produces aversion to extreme probabilities (e.g., Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994; Hilbert, 2012).”

“Here we are following a line of research leading back at least to Thurstone (1927) and continued by various more recent researchers (see, e.g. Dougherty et al., 1999, Erev et al., 1994, Hilbert, 2012).”

“…individuals rely on cognitive “heuristics,” what some scholars refer to as “mental shortcuts,” for quickly processing a large amount of information to arrive at an interpretation of a person, situation, or event, and a decision about how to act (Fiske & Taylor, 2013; Hilbert, 2012; Kahneman, 2011).”

“In addition, expert knowledge tends to be less objective in nature, and human experts cannot always be relied on to give accurate assessments given their limited reasoning capacities [10].”

“Consistency of judgment can be low [14,50,51], as biases influence assessments of surgical risk and the nature of the recommendations made to patients [52–54].”

“Factors such as bounded rationality, a preference for heuristics, emotional state, and social in fl uences can signi fi cantly impact personal judgment, leading to cognitive biases (Hilbert, 2012; Korteling et al., 2023).”

“, 1999) or in Hilbert’s ‘noisy channel’ account of biases in probability estimation (Hilbert, 2012).”

“This phenomenon has been extensively studied by researchers in fields such as psychology, economics, management, and information science [e.g. 5, 14, 18, 27, 44].”

“Whereas cognitive biases have been discussed extensively in the areas of psychology (Gigerenzer, 1991; Hilbert, 2012; Kahneman et al., 1982; West et al., 2008), marketing”

“…behavioral economics research has instead painted a picture of human decision-making as a less than rational process based on cognitive short-cuts (“availability heuristics”) and other errorprone cognitive biases (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; Kunda, 1990; Haselton and Nettle, 2006; Hibert, 2012).”

“Memory-based information processing is influenced by cognitive biases that transition objective observations into subjective interpretations (Hilbert, 2012).”

“Human cognitive bias is a well-studied fact in the psychology field [6,7].”

“, [13,14]); and perhaps laboratory tests of rationality can be downplayed because they lacked “ecological validity” [15].”

“…of co-occurrence network analysis, most current research uses it in the intelligence field to identify research frontiers and dissect research priorities (Merigó et al. 2018; Wang et al. 2022), investigating research hotspots by combining it with methods of social network analysis (Hilbert 2012).”

“Analogous regression effects can be expected under more general conditions (Hilbert, 2012), even when their precise strength cannot be determined.”

“The total amount of online content has increased dramatically over time (Hilbert, 2012).”

“Bias refers to the irrational input-output information processing system that informs our judgements and decisionmaking which is influenced by emotional, social and moral motivations.(50) Biases can therefore explain all that what discussed in the previous paragraph, and they may be responsible for the fact that male…”

“While algorithms have been shown to be attributing factors, users themselves seem to process information differently based on their pre-existing notions and beliefs [42, 61].”

“We begin by considering some recent results from Yearsley and Trueblood (2017), who investigate the simultaneous occurrence of both sequential order effects and the conjunction fallacy in judgements about real-world events: the probabilities of various different Republican and Democratic candidates winning various U.”

“The most conservative explanation is that this effect was caused by noise in the data (Erev et al., 1994; Hilbert, 2012; Costello and Watts, 2014), perhaps due to feature choice error or the random sampling of features in lieu of a more concrete strategy.”

“The results also confirm the results by Oechssler et al. (2009) and Frederick (2005).”

“Hilbert [86] proposes that cognitive biases can be statistically modelled as a result of humans’ noisy memory and information processing.”

“…et al., 1999; Edwards & Smith, 1996; Forgas, 2008; Kunda, 1990), noisy deviations in memory-based information processes (Dougherty et al., 1999; Hilbert, 2012; Usher & McClelland, 2001), erroneous assessments of memory strength (Tidwell et al., 2016), and limited capacity in working memory (De…”

“In the acute lockdown stage, the behavioural effects of the well-known human biases in judgment and decision-making [24, 25] might thus be heightened by the need to filter an unprecedented amount of incoming information from multiple, often contradictory, sources [26].”

“Scholarship on heuristic processing has also led scholars to study cognitive biases, which reduce cognitive load but also potentially interfere with cognitive ability and critical thinking (Hilbert, 2012; Jeffrey, 2015).”

“For a brief survey on cognitive biases in decision making process, see Hilbert (2012).”

“Many of these factors are cognitive in nature [10].”

“Cognitive biases, such as framing, overconfidence, and anchoring, continue to influence managerial decisions (Hilbert, 2012; Meissner & Wulf, 2016).”

“, Drugowitsch, Wyart, Devauchelle, & Koechlin, 2016; Stengard & 262 Van Den Berg, 2019), but may potentially also explain, at least in part, many of the biases that 263 have been found in cognition (Erev et al., 1994; Hilbert, 2012).”

“As such, while automated analytics applications may facilitate the identification of patterns, we still need to make sense of these patterns in order to transform them into actionable insights ( Hilbert, 2012 ).”

“A more promising alternative is to consider corruptive noise in memory or evidence accumulation, which can produce stronger biases (e.g., Costello & Watts, 2014; Erev et al., 1994; Hilbert, 2012).”

“…and scientific reasoning (e.g., Fischer et al., 2014; Stanovich, 2016) and (corresponding) reasoning biases and heuristics (Kahneman et al., 1982; Gigerenzer, 2008; Hilbert, 2012) of information processing and decision making (for an overview, see, e.g., Stanovich, 2003; Toplak et al., 2007).”

“…also a form of noise or regressiveness in response (Ayton, Hunt, & Wright, 1991; Burson, Larrick, & Klayman, 2006; Costello & Watts, 2014; Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994; Faro & Rottenstreich, 2006; Fiedler & Unkelbach, 2014; Gino et al., 2011; Hilbert, 2012; Juslin et al., 2000; Kahneman, 2011).”

“Problems like demographic skew [21] or cognitive biases [38] cannot be “patched out” in the same way as errors.”

“This approach follows a line of research leading back at least to Thurstone (1927) and continued by various more recent researchers (see, e.g. Dougherty, Gettys, & Ogden, 1999; Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994; Hilbert, 2012).”

“Overconfidence Effect: Tendency of having greater confidence in one’s own judgments than the objective one.(7) What can go wrong: the sender provides information through an inappropriate strategy with respect to the explanation intention, based on the confidence of the correctness of their role as an explainer.”

“According to error-management theory, the systematic cognitive biases that govern information processing may result in misbeliefs that are at odds with reality but remain adaptive overall.(49,51,55,56) Still, it is hard to deny that cognitive biases and their resulting misbeliefs can sometimes have significant negativ…”

“That is because of the imperfect information processing system the decision is imperfect as well, and very often some distortion appears in the solution [3].”

“…that are difficult to separate from each other—for instance, heuristics (Shah and Oppenheimer 2008; Tversky and Kahneman 1974), noise and limited information processing capacity (Hilbert 2012; Simon 1955), emotional and moral motivations (Pfister and Böhm 2008), and social influence (Wang et al.”

“This is when decision makers deviate from predicted outcomes and make seemingly irrational choices that are not in their best interest (e.g., Ariely 2008; Hilbert 2012).”

“…assumption is that individuals are cognitive misers; reluctant to engage in deliberative, effortful, time-consuming and rule-based cognition (Early et al., 2020; Fiske & Taylor, 1991) but more likely to engage in intuitive and automatic information processing (Hilbert, 2012; Maynes, 2015).”

“…common across these choice specifications is that the evidence construction process is psychologically and biophysically (e.g., neurally) constrained and thus noisy, due to random variation in the processing environment (both external and internal to the human body: Hilbert, 2012; Rat-cliff, 2001).”