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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science pp 1–3Cite as

Biases

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A cognitive bias refers to any systematic deviation from accuracy or “rationality” in judgment and decision-making. Some commonly examined biases include the following: confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirming one’s existing beliefs); hindsight bias (the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to have forecasted known outcomes); base rate neglect (the tendency to ignore general frequency information and instead focus on specific information); and sexual over-perception – the tendency for men to over-perceive sexual interest in others. Simon (1955) first proposed that people use simple mental shortcuts (heuristics) for judgment and decision-making, leading to what appears to be biased decision-making. The “heuristics-and-biases program” achieved greater prominence as a result of the publication of Tversky and Kahneman’s (1974) seminal Science paper. Tversky and Kahneman’s work has largely focused on understanding heuristics and biases as errorsin judgment...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada

    Dallas Novakowski

  2. Faculty of Business Administration, University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada

    Sandeep Mishra

Authors
  1. Dallas Novakowski
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  2. Sandeep Mishra
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Correspondence to Sandeep Mishra .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  2. Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada

    Doug P. VanderLaan

  2. Child, Youth and Family Division, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Doug P. VanderLaan

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Novakowski, D., Mishra, S. (2018). Biases. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_627-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_627-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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