Cognitive biases in human perception, judgment, and decision making: Bridging theory and the real world

Scienti c research into human cognition is well established by decades of rigorous behavioral experimentation, studies of the human brain, and computer simulations. All of these converge to provide scienti c insights into perception, judgment, and decision making (Dror & € omas, 2005; Kosslyn & Koenig, 1995). Many of these theoretical insights play an important role in our understanding of how humans behave in the real world. € e scienti c research has important bearings on how human perception, judgment, and decision making can be enhanced, as well as how both lay people and experts can (and do) make mistakes. Bridging scienti c theory to the real world can assist our understanding of human performance and error and help us evaluate the reliability of humans. Furthermore, it has implications on how to minimize such error through proper selection and training, best practices, and utilizing technology (Dror, 2007, in press). In this chapter, scienti c  ndings about human cognition are discussed and linked to practical issues in the real world of investigations. We  rst must understand the theoretical and conceptual framework of perception, judgment, and decision making (Lindsay & Norman, 1977; Marr, 1982; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). Information comes to us from the outside world via sensory input (vision, hearing, touch, etc.). As information is received, it is processed; for example, we try to identify and make sense of it, interpret and assign it meaning, compare it to information already stored in memory, and so on. One of the fundamental and established cornerstones of human cognition is that people do not passively receive and encode information.  e mind is not a camera. We actively interact with the incoming information in a variety of ways. What we see not only re! ects the pure and raw data from the input provided by the external world, but it is, to a 5