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Cognitive explanations for confirmation bias are based on limitations in people's ability to handle complex tasks, and the shortcuts, called heuristics, that they use. [68] For example, people may judge the reliability of evidence by using the availability heuristic that is, how readily a particular idea comes to mind. [ 69 ]
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. [31] There are multiple other cognitive biases which involve or are types of confirmation bias: Backfire effect, a tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs. [32]
An availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. As follows, people tend to use a readily available fact to base their beliefs on a comparably distant concept.
Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic errors." [ 6 ] For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as "The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood" of an occurrence by the extent of which the event "resembles the typical case."
A heuristic device is used when an entity X exists to enable understanding of, or knowledge concerning, some other entity Y. A good example is a model that, as it is never identical with what it models, is a heuristic device to enable understanding of what it models. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed heuristic in this sense.
Heuristics (from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω, heurískō, "I find, discover") is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, [1] [2] [3] organizations, [4] and even machines [5] use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems.
For example, people have long believed that ulcers were caused by stress, due to the representativeness heuristic, when in fact bacteria cause ulcers. [2] In a similar line of thinking, in some alternative medicine beliefs patients have been encouraged to eat organ meat that corresponds to their medical disorder.
The availability heuristic, first identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is a mental shortcut that occurs when people judge the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that, "if you can think of it, it must be important."