Over the hundreds of articles published on the Psy-Fi Blog we've generated a long list of examples of behavioral biases, which is now collated in The Big List of Behavioral Biases. It's an extraordinary compendium of irrationality, an imperfect register of the various strange ways in which rational economics goes astray. Ultimately, though, what we have here is really just one long argument. It's a formidably long list already, and we haven't got to the bottom of the ever-increasing range of peculiar behaviors that we exhibit when placed in the appropriate situation. Unfortunately, the longer the list becomes the more perplexing becomes the underlying issue: after all, many of these biases could easily conflict with each other, dependent on the situation we find ourselves in. Some researchers have started trying to understand this by looking at neurology and so called heuristics and biases models, but it's clear that we're still a long way from any real understanding of the mechanisms involved.
Certainly some of these issues seem to be implicated in lots of others. Anchoring is a prime example which appears to colour people's perceptions in all sorts of different contexts: and context is another, through the mechanism of framing, which creates the context within which we make a decision. Some biases appear to be deeply rooted in prior beliefs, such as confirmation bias, and others are almost impervious to any attempt to change them, such as hindsight bias.
Other errors are straightforward logic problems – such as the infamous Linda problem, otherwise known as the conjunction fallacy in which the combination of two events is rated as more likely than a single event. It's statistically impossible for a person to be more likely to be a librarian and a feminist activist than just a librarian, no matter how carefully framed is the question: but many studies have show that's what many people believe. There's a clue, however, that part of the problem with all of these biases is the experimental framework within which they're conducted. Whether we like it or not we make inferences from context, and if that inference appears to point in the direction of Linda the librarian being a raging feminist then we'll make that logical leap, no matter how actually illogical it is.
Of all the biases listed here, though, the one that seems to have the most…
