So, What Are Cognitive Biases?

Abstract

Despite more than 40 years of research into the field and the increasing use of the term in the media, there is still some uncertainty and even mystery over cognitive biases. This chapter provides a background to the topic with the aim to clarify what is meant by cognitive biases. After introducing some uses and misuses of the term, examples of common biases are presented. This is followed by a brief history of the research in the area over the years which illustrates the continued debate on cognitive biases and decision-making. Work in the emerging field of cognitive biases in visualization, prior to this publication, is outlined which concerns both the interpretation of the visualization and the visualization tools, such as visual analytic systems. Finally, we discuss the challenging issue of debiasing - how to mitigate the undesirable impact of cognitive biases on judgments.