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This chapter argues that social justice requires that equality be publicly realized. Social justice is realized in social and political institutions that attempt to establish justice. It requires that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. In the case of justice as equality, it must not only be the case that people are treated as equals; they must be able to see that they are treated as equals. Hence, social justice requires what is called public equality. It is argued that public equality is grounded on the principle of equality defended in the last chapter and the circumstances of disagreement, diversity, fallibility, and cognitive bias that attend efforts to implement justice in any moderately complex society as well as the fundamental interests of persons in society. This grounds the idea of the egalitarian standpoint from which the justification of political institutions proceeds. That is the first stage of the argument for grounding of democracy on equality.

Biased social information processing is thought to underlie the development and maintenance of anxiety and depression. Two such biases that have been frequently linked to anxiety and depression are selective attention to threatening stimuli, and negative interpretation of ambiguous situations. This chapter covers the basic methodological and conceptual background of attention and interpretive biases to threat and then explores how cognitive bias modification has been used to attenuate these biases and in turn decrease anxiety and, in some cases, depression.

Cognitive processes and their adaptive functions can hardly be understood if we look exclusively inside the mind, such as when we try to explain behavior with traits, attitudes, or preferences. Rather, it is essential to analyze the adaptive match between cognitive and ecological structures. This chapter shows that many phenomena that look like cognitive fallacies follow logically from a cognitive system well adapted to its environment. Specifically, the chapter presents an ecological analysis of judgment and choice in terms of the three moments of statistical distributions of information in environments. The chapter demonstrates that phenomena from various areas of psychology can be accounted for by people’s sensitivity to the three moments, and it also describes the implications of these moments in terms of the effect of regression toward the mean, the role of sample size, and the process of sampling.

This chapter explores the psychiatric disorder of depression and the opening section provides relevant statistics and a brief history of related research on depression. This chapter focuses on depressive disorder, as opposed to a related mood disorder—bipolar disorder. This chapter examines in detail the parameters, role, and origins of cognitive dysfunction in depression. The related theories on the role of cognition in depression developed by Beck, Bower, and Teasdale are presented. This is followed by a review of existing empirical studies of cognitive function in depression which begins with the crude, early investigations based on self-report questionnaires to more recent studies which employ information-processing methodologies developed by experimental cognitive psychologists. Insights related to the linkage between depression and deficits in attention, memory, and judgment are then presented. The role of these cognitive biases in recovery from depressive episodes are explored and linked with the issues of childhood depression.

Economics and cognitive psychology have long debated the nature of human rationality. One says humans have a capacity for rational calculation, while the other points to “cognitive bias” in people’s judgments. Herbert Simon, a psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in economics, offers a consensus view that humans have objective and subjective rationality. The first rationality is consistent behavior toward a goal, while the second is having personal “good reasons” for beliefs and behavior. The historical idea of “economic man” was invented for use in theoretical models, so to end that stereotype, economist are providing richer definitions of rational behavior. Anthropologists have linked religion to the “primitive mind,” while critics of religion say it is irrational. However, not all anthropologists agree. Most people, including the well-educated, adhere to religion, suggesting a “rational choice” for its personal and social usefulness and its explanations of reality.

Cognitive performance of the participants has crucial significance for legal trials, sometimes making the difference between fair and unfair verdicts. Jury members are expected to passively listen to long arguments, often about unfamiliar subjects, retain that information and then perform an unbiased deliberation to reach a just verdict. There are many natural cognitive limitations that impair this process: inattention, sleepiness, stress, the fallibility of human memory and our cognitive biases. Could juror cognition be improved, and would this improve the legal process? This chapter compares external aids such as notetaking with biomedical aids such as cognition enhancement drugs. It appears likely that enhancement drugs might improve juror cognition if used well, and in any case at least some jurors are likely already using them. There is also the possibility that some of them might introduce cognitive biases. However, given the low bar required for juror competence these biases might be regarded as acceptable, especially compared to the biases inherent in the deliberation process itself.

The reluctance to introduce competency‐destroying innovations may be understood as a product of the decision‐making biases of many large firms; some large firms tend to lose their ability and desire to engage in competency‐destroying innovative activities as they grow because of decision‐making biases associated with their size, asset base, business practices, and organizational structure. There are two key behavioural factors that influence and bias decision making in organizations: bounded rationality (and cognitive biases in general), and inconsistent risk aversion. The interaction of these behavioural aspects with the established capabilities, complementary assets, and administrative and organizational routines in firms intensifies decision‐making biases, thereby limiting radical innovation. Implications for managing innovation and change are considered.

This introduction concerns essentialism in everyday thought. Roughly, essentialism is the view that categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives an object its identity. According to essentialism, categories (such as “boy,” “girl,” or “intelligence”) are real, in several senses: they are discovered (rather than invented), they are natural (rather than artificial), they predict other properties, and they point to natural discontinuities in the world. The question of whether children are essentialists runs directly against a powerful portrait of children's concepts as perceptually driven, concrete, and atheoretical. This chapter argues that children's concepts are not merely perceptually based, concrete, or built up from specifics, but rather reflect folk theories and a powerful capacity to look beyond the obvious. The discussion focuses on essentialism as an early, domain-specific cognitive bias; children's concepts as embedded in theories; and language as an influence on cognitive development.

Natural selection is the process responsible for the functional adaptation of biological organisms. Despite its basic and applied scientific relevance, it remains one of the most widely misunderstood concepts of contemporary science. In this chapter, the conceptual underpinnings of some of these misunderstandings are explored and it is argued that many of them have their roots in cognitive biases that are observable in preschoolers and elementary school children. Central among these is the teleological tendency to explain phenomena by reference to function. The chapter presents developmental work exploring this tendency and also reviews recent findings concerning the possible origins of the bias. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this and other developmental research for early evolutionary education.

For decades virtually every scholarly work on trial judges began by lamenting the unfortunate tendency of students of judicial behavior to concentrate almost exclusively on appellate courts generally and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular. Fortunately, although this imbalance is still present to a degree, a nascent body of research has ameliorated the disparity and enhanced greatly our understanding of civil trial courts, trial judges, and the psychology of trial judging over the last decade. We review this research and conclude, first, that this research collectively suggests a value-based exercise of judicial discretion that may reflect intentional or unintentional bias in trial judging when the dispute involves ideological issues and, second, that when faced with science-based standards, statistical evidence, and other risk-assessment tasks, judges are susceptible to many of the same limits on objectivity and accuracy that plague jurors and all human decision makers faced with difficult judgments.

Judges confront rules in two ways, as rule-makers and as rule-followers. When a judge decides a case that is not governed by an existing rule, the judge must formulate a rule of decision and calculate the effects of the rule in future cases. Rule-making is a highly deliberative process, in which the judge must select the rule that will best realize relevant values over the range of cases to which it applies. When a judge decides a case that is governed by a precedent rule, the judge is expected to treat the precedent rule as authoritative. To do this, the judge must follow the rule mechanically, without reflecting on the relationship between the outcome of the rule and the values on which the rule is based. These two tasks — rule-making and rule-following — make different, and possibly conflicting, cognitive demands on judges.

Autism is diagnosed through a symptom of clusters known as the diagnostic triad. One of these is the rigid adherence to routines, repetitive activities, and narrowly focused interests which represent behavioural and cognitive biases due to a lack of imaginative cognition. The other two clusters include impairment in communication and social interaction because of impairments of imagination. These symptoms gave rise to the assumption that autism impairs imagination. Symptoms consistent with this view are prominent throughout the clinical and research profile of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, some individuals diagnosed with autism exhibit excellent gifts in the field of creative imagination such as in arts, music, and poetry. Some of these personages who suffered from autism include Samuel Beckett, Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This claim purports that autism is not only compatible with creative imagination but in some sense promotes it. This chapter discusses the evidence for the impairment of the imagination in ASD and shows how these problems align with the key psychological models of autism. It evaluates the evidence for elements of preserved imagination by considering autistic visual arts and autistic spectrum poetry. It also highlights the implications of the relationship of autism and imagination.

This chapter defends a theory of citizenship that recognizes our need to make online decisions under electoral pressures, given our foibles as decision makers. Drawing upon the extensive literature on decision and judgment, it examines how fragile citizens are when it comes to decision making. The usual heuristics offered by political scientists suggest that citizens rely on informational shortcuts that are morally irresponsible. If we reconceive the role of the voter in explicitly moral terms, this approach is unsatisfactory in addressing the cognitive biases and defects of citizens. The chapter also considers the notion of cognitive partisanship and argues that it is unavoidable for decision makers to rely on heuristics when they reason about complex decisions. It concludes by emphasizing the task for a democratic ethics of belief: to provide citizens with heuristics that reduce the cognitive burden while respecting the moral obligations to attach to coercive, term-shaping decision making.

Could changes to the laws that regulate campaigns improve them? This chapter addresses this question by reviewing the social science literature on how people arrive at political opinions. This literature demonstrates dramatically that the actual persuasion of voters plays virtually no meaningful role in American election campaigns because it is next to impossible to persuade voters during an election campaign of anything they do not already believe. Several mutually reinforcing phenomena work to stabilize political beliefs and to insulate their holders against the possibility of short-term persuasion during campaigns. These phenomena include cognitive processes that bias voters' attention and comprehension in favor of beliefs they already hold; social reinforcement effects that, through processes of ordinary social interaction, tend to suppress and punish dissident viewpoints; and cognitive information-processing strategies that reduce voters' incentives to seek out and attend to campaign information, or to change their opinions in response to it.

The cognitive bias research claims that people are naturally prone to making mistakes in reasoning and memory, including the mistake of over-estimating their knowledge. This chapter proposes a new theoretical model for confidence in knowledge based on the more charitable assumption that people are good judges of the reliability of their knowledge, provided that the knowledge is representatively sampled from a specified reference class. It claims that this model both predicts new experimental results and explains a wide range of extant experimental findings on confidence, including some perplexing inconsistencies. It consists of three parts: an exposition of the proposed theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM theory); a report of experimental tests confirming these predictions; and an explanation of apparent anomalies in previous experimental results by means of PMMs.

Child welfare practitioners make life-altering decisions on a daily basis. This chapter describes factors affecting decisions drawing on literature concerning decision making, problem solving and judgement in multiple areas. The importance of thinking critically about decisions, including related uncertainties, is highlighted. Topics discussed include structuring problems, identifying goals, the importance of situational awareness, cognitive biases that affect the quality of decisions and the use of simplifying strategies such as fast and fugal heuristics as well as analytical thinking. The importance of recognizing errors as inevitable and as providing learning opportunities is highlighted as is the limited information regarding these in child welfare. Barriers to sound decision making are discussed including self imposed barriers such as inflated views of one’s own competencies. The need for a systemic approach is emphasized including attention to professional education programs, as well as organizational factors, and the importance of using valid assessment frameworks and measures, and learning from our errors.

Some have suggested that we must define good judging before we begin studying, evaluating, and reforming judicial decision making. This chapter argues that this view is understandable but questions whether it is possible, or necessary, or even helpful, to start with this task. When we are thinking about what research should be done concerning judges and judicial decision making during the next decade, and what improvements to our justice system might result from that research, what seems like the most logical place to start may delay our departure and lead us in the wrong direction. We need the dedication and courage to pursue openly a painstaking interdisciplinary inquiry into the question of how best to structure the process of judicial decision making and then implement reforms based on what we learn. And we need to get started right away.

This chapter discusses cognitive considerations that need to be taken into account in the development of citizen science projects. It first looks at a research project with combined research and educational goals, called Spotting the Weedy Invasives, using it to highlight the potential benefits of using a learning sciences approach in the development of citizen science training and educational programs. It then examines issues related to both data quality and learning gains, including cognitive processes and the potential for cognitive bias. It emphasizes the importance of aligning research goals with attributes of participants and how cognitive biases may affect the quality of citizen science data. The chapter concludes with an assessment of what the project design and results it describes might mean for the design of larger, Internet-based, geographically dispersed citizen science initiatives.

This chapter briefly introduces error management theory, an evolutionary framework for understanding how natural selection should be expected to shape decision-making mechanisms. Selection minimizes not the overall rate of error in decision making, but rather the expected fitness burden of error. This means that where the fitness impact of errors is asymmetric (e.g., when failing to run from a predator that is present is more costly than running from a predator which is not in fact there), evolution will favor mechanisms that choose the cheap error much more often than the costly one. This principle can be applied to decision making in many different domains. This chapter discusses the relationships between error management theory and expected utility theory, and the extent to which error management theory can be invoked to explain the prevalence of biased beliefs.

It is clear that a wide range of situations exist that can potentially lead people to believe that they have experienced the paranormal when in fact they have not. The question regarding possible differences between believers and non-believers in the paranormal in terms of proneness to cognitive biases can now be answered rather more definitively than has been possible previously. Believers in the paranormal tend to be poorer at syllogistic reasoning, have a more distorted concept of randomness leading them to see meaning where there is none, are more susceptible to experiencing anomalous sensations and are, in certain circumstances, more suggestible. Memory biases in the accuracy of eyewitness testimony for ostensibly paranormal events have also often been reported, and evidence is beginning to accumulate that believers may be more prone to false memories.