Chapter 5
Cognitive Biases
You will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
The world we experience online and offline is a firehose of data. If our brains had to pay attention to every stimulus, we would quickly become overwhelmed and paralyzed. Instead, humans use heuristics. Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, describes heuristics as “a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally, and accurately than more complex methods.”1 Among behavioral scientists, there is considerable contention about whether heuristics are good or bad.
1. Gigerenzer, Gerd, and Gaissmaier, Wolfgang, “Heuristic ...
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