Essay on Judgmental Biases Influencing Decisions

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Judgmental Biases Influencing Decisions
Prashantkumar Patel
American College of Commerce & Technology
Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Professor: Dr. Godson Chukwuma
05/01/2015

Human judgment and decision making is distorted by an array of cognitive, perceptual and motivational biases. People tend to recognize the operation of bias in judgment – except their own.
Perception of bias in self-versus others:
Involves people’s heavy weighting of introspective evidence when assessing own bias.
Self-enhancement biases
Self-interest biases
Prejudice and group-based biases
Other biases in prediction, assessment and estimation
Bias blind spot:
Involves people’s conviction that their perceptions directly reflects reality, and that those who see things differently are biased.
Unconscious bias and an introspection illusion
Naïve realism and disagreement

Self-enhancement biases:
Peoples are inclined to see themselves in positive light, even evidence opposes. Disregard evidence that threatens their self-esteem.
Rate themselves as ‘better than average’ on a wide range of traits and abilities, claims that their overly positive self-views are objectively true. These unwarranted claims of objectivity persist even when they are informed about the prevalence of bias.
Ex – Participants assessed their own and a peer’s self-serving bias in a single situation. They took a purported test of social intelligence, and displayed classic bias – those who were told they performed well claimed that the test was more valid than those who were told that they performed poorly. Self-interest bias:
Human behavior is guided by people’s tendency to make judgments based on what best serves their self-interest (i.e. financial or political, etc.).
People view self-interest as essential for motivating human behavior, viewed as a more crucial motivator of others than of themselves. They assume that other who work hard at jobs are motivated by external incentives i.e. money, whereas they claim that they personally are motivated by internal incentives i.e. feeling a sense of accomplishment.
Ex- In a study, students predicted their own and their peers likely contribution to an upcoming charity event. They made positive predictions about their own future generosity but not about their peers, suggesting that they were more prone to anticipate self-interest in others behavior than in their own. Prejudice and group-based biases:
People stereotypic beliefs about other groups, and their affiliations with their own in-groups, colors their perceptions and judgments.
People generally believe that they are immune to group-based biases. They claim freedom from racial bias, and from gender bias, even if they show this biases – at times even bias more strongly the more objective they claim to be.
Ex- Although people’s political party affiliation can bias them towards adopting policy positions that defy their own values, people deny that influence on their positions. In general, people view others as being more biased than themselves by the ideology of their political in-groups. Other biases in prediction, assessment and estimation
Prediction, assessment and estimation is common task for everyday life. Inopportunely, cognitive biases compromising our efforts at these tasks are also common.
Ex- One is biased towards under predicting how long they will take to complete work tasks but they do recognize this tendency in themselves. Similarly, people do not recognize the influence on themselves of the hindsight bias (i.e. the bias to judge historical facts).
As with the anchoring effect, one of the most well-known biases in social judgment also involves the unwarranted impact of salient
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