Mapping Biases to the Components of Rationalistic and Naturalistic Decision Making

Abstract

People often create and use shortcuts or “rules of thumb” to make decisions. The majority of time, reliance on these heuristics helps us to perform efficiently and effectively. Yet, this reliance can also promote bias, or systematic error. Our review of the literature suggests that both decision-making approaches that are rational and natural are likely to be subject to a range of biases. Unfortunately, the available literature provides very little discussion of what aspects biases are likely to impact within each of these processes. In the absence of this discussion, we have attempted to combine our knowledge of the bias literature and the decision-making literature to explore what biases are likely to impact various components of each decision-making process. Includes the following biases: availability, representativeness, anchoring & adjustment, confirmation, hindsight, overconfidence, framing and affect.