Questions: Cognitive Biases and Judgment Under Uncertainty

Question 1

After seeing several news stories about plane crashes, a person concludes that flying is more dangerous than driving. Which cognitive bias best explains this judgment error?

• A. Anchoring bias
• B. Representativeness heuristic
• C. Availability heuristic
• D. Confirmation bias

Answer: (C)

The availability heuristic leads people to judge the frequency or probability of events by how easily examples come to mind. Dramatic plane crashes dominate news coverage and are vividly memorable, making flying feel more dangerous — even though driving has a far higher fatality rate per mile traveled.

Question 2

Once a person learns about a specific cognitive bias, they will reliably avoid committing that error in future judgments.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Knowing about a bias does not reliably neutralize it. Research shows that awareness alone is insufficient because biases operate automatically in heuristic processing. Effective debiasing requires structural interventions — such as consider-the-opposite prompts, slowing down, or using reference-class data — not just intellectual knowledge of the bias.

Question 3

Why are cognitive biases described as 'systematic' rather than random errors in judgment?

Model answer: Cognitive biases are predictable and directional — the same bias produces the same type of error across different people and different situations. They reflect the underlying shortcuts (heuristics) that the cognitive system applies consistently, not arbitrary noise. This systematicity is what makes them scientifically tractable and practically important.

Random errors would cancel out across people and occasions. Systematic errors are correlated: they push judgments in the same direction, which is why they accumulate rather than average out. Kahneman and Tversky's insight was precisely that these errors are patterned enough to reveal the underlying heuristic mechanisms.