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The bias paradox: A bias for cognitive biases

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https://iai.tv/articles/the-bias-paradox..._auid=2020

EXCERPTS: How rational are we? [...] Over the last few decades, psychologists have uncovered numerous ways that humans fail to live up to our own ideal of rationality... [...] Worse still, many of these cognitive biases are supposed to influence scientists and experts ... These and many other systematic reasoning errors have been widely shown to affect the practice of scientific practitioners when it concerns the types of reasoning that are employed in the course of their scientific research.

As many researchers have pointed out, some of these apparently irrational inferences can actually be seen to be more reasonable in certain contexts. Sometimes the very same pattern of inference can be viewed as a bias in some contexts and a heuristic in others, where a heuristic is often defined as a shortcut in reasoning—a quick and dirty rule-of-thumb. Think of confirmation bias again. It can be debilitating to constantly seek to refute one’s own hypotheses, and so having a tendency towards confirmation as opposed to disconfirmation can be healthy in many contexts, even if it leads us astray in many others. It is at once a bias and a heuristic depending on the context in which you are using it.

The research on [url=heuristics and biases has by now posited hundreds of such reasoning biases, ranging from the “confirmation bias” and the “conjunction fallacy” to the “cheerleader effect” (the supposed tendency for people to appear more attractive to us in a group than in isolation) and the “IKEA effect” (the tendency to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves).  At the time of writing, the Wikipedia entry “List of cognitive biases” enumerates over 175 distinct cognitive biases.

This proliferation of biases raises a question: are we overly prone to attributing biases to ourselves? When we see a pattern of reasoning error in humans, do we have a systematic tendency to posit a new bias, even if there might be alternative explanations? Given the proliferation of biases and the fact that more are ‘discovered’ each year, we seem to have strong evidence that we are biased toward explaining failures of human reasoning by positing biases. Let’s call this the ‘Bias Bias’.

[...] The very same evidence that leads them to posit a confirmation bias is also evidence that would tend to cast doubt on their conclusions! However, suppose that another member of the research team, call her the “pragmatic professor,” says: “Wait, if we are rejecting our research because we were subject to the confirmation bias, then the confirmation bias does exist because we were subject to it!”

[...] Maybe we can resist the paradoxical conclusion. One way is to distinguish the context of the experiment from the context of the inquirers. If one can show that confirmation bias afflicts primarily laypersons or those who are reasoning in experimental conditions, then one might be able to argue that the researchers themselves are not subject to that bias.

In many cases, this strategy works well: in a scientific context researchers can ensure that they are avoiding the bias they are studying. However, it doesn’t seem like we can do that when we posit a Bias Bias. Anyone positing a Bias Bias is likely doing so with reference to an established body of scientific research—not just lay thinking. In other words, it is the reasoning of experts that is at issue. So any experts who come up with such a critique would need to demonstrate that they themselves are not victims of the same bias when they attribute it to others. Why are some experts subject to the bias and not others? What makes the context of the researchers being criticized different from that of their critics?

Early critics of the heuristics and biases research program once cast doubt on its very cogency. [...] The very idea was incoherent according to them. ... we can certainly use some aspects of human reasoning to examine other aspects without raising problems about self-reflexivity. But in some cases, we do seem to be led into a self-reflexive paradox, in particular when it comes to positing a Bias Bias, as we have argued in a recent journal article.

At least at first sight, given the multiplication of biases in the recent scholarly research and in popular culture, it seems reasonable to conjecture that humans are subject to a Bias Bias. Yet positing such a thing seems to lead us into an inevitable paradox. What looked on the face of it like a reasonable hypothesis is, in fact, a claim we seem not to be able to make without contradiction.
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