Availability Heuristic looks out of place. It’s pretty much the only bias I have (beside confirmation bias, which is hard to avoid as sneaky it is), but how should one survive in this world without relying on others? Without doing a scientific bias free study on every topic in life, you’re unavoidable suffering from that bias. A healthy level would be avoiding making it a rule. I regularly disagree with friends decisions, so maybe I don’t have this bias.
I’d say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.
It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy) because they reduce the time and energy expediture, sometimes massivelly so.
Personally I try to “balance” shortcuts vs actual research (in a day to day sense, rather than Research) by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I’ll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it’s not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it’s well worth investing days into researching it when you’re buying a brand new car or a house.
Availability Heuristic looks out of place. It’s pretty much the only bias I have (beside confirmation bias, which is hard to avoid as sneaky it is), but how should one survive in this world without relying on others? Without doing a scientific bias free study on every topic in life, you’re unavoidable suffering from that bias. A healthy level would be avoiding making it a rule. I regularly disagree with friends decisions, so maybe I don’t have this bias.
I’d say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.
It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy) because they reduce the time and energy expediture, sometimes massivelly so.
Personally I try to “balance” shortcuts vs actual research (in a day to day sense, rather than Research) by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I’ll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it’s not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it’s well worth investing days into researching it when you’re buying a brand new car or a house.