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Cognitive biases - Coggle Diagram
Cognitive biases
Chou and Edge 2012
An opportunity sample of 425 undergraduate US students and had them complete questions asking if many of their friends are happier than them on a scale of 1-10. They also took down how many hours a week they spent on Facebook. If people are spending a lot of time on Facebook then they are going to be seeing everyone elses happy experiences as people rarely post negative things about their life on Facebook.
Findings: people who spent more time on Facebook were more likely to say that other peoples lives were more happy and they compared themselves to all of the happy things other people were posting. But those who spent more time out and about in the real world and less time on Facebook were less likely to say that other peoples lives were better and more happy than their own. There was also a result that people who followed a larger amount of people who they do not actually know were also more likely to say others lives were happier than their own.
This demonstrates the availability heuristic as if a persons main source of information on another persons life is through social media, then the available knowledge for them is going to be of the other person likely being happy from what they have posted on Facebook. Therefore they think that the other persons life is only happy and do not consider other ways of attaining that knowledge.
Strengths: it can be argued that the large majority of people who spend their time online is younger people so the sample used in the study is appropriate.
There is also high mundane realism as the social media is a real life app.
The study also used 425 people which is a very large sample size and is higher than most other studies we look at.
Weaknesses: the data used is self reported and cannot be checked by the researcher which means it is impossible to tell if a person is lying about how long they spend on social meida or in this case Facebook.
The data used is also subjective to the participant as happiness can be interpreted in many ways and one persons level of a 6 may be anothers version of a 9.
A cognitive bias is an illogical, systematic error in thinking that negatively affect decision making
Human beings are not always rational thinkers and often rely on a number of cognitive short cuts resulting in a number of well researched biases. There is a tenancy to focus on a limited amount of available information to confirm pre-existing beliefs as well as trying to avoid mental stress of holding inconsistent cognitions.
People such as judges have been trained to avoid cognitive biases to make sure they don't make incorrect and hurried decisions that may have been decided by biases.
The first bias is confirmation bias, this is where some information is favoured because it confirms your pre existing biases or beliefs.
These confirmation biases impact not only how we gather information but also how we recall information. For example people who support a specific idea will read news stories and they will interpret that news in a way that supports their existing idea and perspective and will therefore recall the information that supports their idea.
Study = Ask and Granhag
68 students and 50 criminal investigators were both given a set of facts from a preliminary investigation of a homicide case. One group was told that the woman found in the apartment at the time of the death was the prime suspect and was also found to have had a jealousy towards the victim and therefore had a motive to kill the victim. The other group was given the information that there had been a number of anonymous phone calls to the woman threatening her. Both groups were then given the same 20 item list of observations taken at the murder scene.
Findings: students displayed confirmation bias as they gave guilt to the prime suspect when she was given the motive of jealousy. However when there was an alternative culprit of the anonymous phone calls they were less likely to say the prime suspect was guilty. Therefore the initial hypothesis of the jealousy motive gave the students a bias. The investigators however were less affected by the hypothesis and gave the guilt to the prime suspect no matter what the hypothesis was.
Strengths: it was a lab experiment and therefore has high internal validity.
It also has independent groups design which means there was a reduced chance of order effects.
Weaknesses: independent group design means that there is a chance for participant variables.
There is also low mundane realism as emotion would play a huge role inn a real life homicide and it is also very unlikely that someone is going to be involved in a homicide case and has to give their verdict.
The second bias is the availability heuristic, this is where a mental short cut is used that relies on immediate examples that come to someones mind about a concept or decision. It is then justified that this immediate example is more important than alternative solutions that cannot be as easily recalled.
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