Cognitive bias mitigation

Continuing this post, the wiki with the above title is instructive. An excerpt from the section on evolutionary psychology follows, noting that it takes intensive training of our system 2, reflective reasoning capacity to overcome such bias. Hence the reason political programmers are hell bent on decimating our educational system, which function had previously been to provide that training. As noted in the previous post, we can also find inroads into changing biases using stories designed by system 1 but within a system 2 format.

"This discipline explicitly challenges the prevalent view that humans are rational agents maximizing expected value/utility, using formal analytical methods to do so. Practitioners such as Cosmides, Tooby, Haselton, Confer and others posit that cognitive biases are more properly referred to as Cognitive Heuristics, and should be viewed as a toolkit of cognitive shortcuts^] selected for by evolutionary pressure and thus are features rather than flaws, as assumed in the prevalent view. Theoretical models and analyses supporting this view are plentiful. This view suggests that negative reasoning outcomes arise primarily because the reasoning challenges faced by modern humans, and the social and political context within which these are presented, make demands on our ancient 'heuristic toolkit' that at best create confusion as to which heuristics to apply in a given situation, and at worst generate what adherents of the prevalent view call 'reasoning errors'."


"There is an emerging convergence between Evolutionary Psychology and the concept of our reasoning mechanism being segregated (approximately) into 'System 1' and 'System 2'. In this view, System 1 is the 'first line' of cognitive processing of all perceptions, including internally generated 'pseudo-perceptions', which automatically, subconsciously and near-instantaneously produces emotionally valenced judgments of their probable effect on the individual's well-being. By contrast, System 2 is responsible for 'executive control', taking System 1's judgments as advisories, making future predictions, via prospection, of their actualization and then choosing which advisories, if any, to act on. In this view, System 2 is slow, simple-minded and lazy, usually defaulting to System 1 advisories and overriding them only when intensively trained to do so or when cognitive dissonance would result. In this view, our 'heuristic toolkit' resides largely in System 1, conforming to the view of Cognitive Biases being unconscious, automatic and very difficult to detect and override. Evolutionary Psychology practitioners emphasize that our heuristic toolkit, despite the apparent abundance of 'reasoning errors' attributed to it, actually performs exceptionally well, given the rate at which it must operate, the range of judgments it produces, and the stakes involved. The System 1/2 view of the human reasoning mechanism appears to have empirical plausibility (see Neuroscience, next) and thus may contribute to a theory and practice of Cognitive Bias Mitigation."