It is common to think of human biases as resulting from limited cognitive resources. This idea has had immense influence on research, public policy, and popular culture, and it is no doubt correct in some cases. But it misses the fact that reaching biased judgments often requires integrating more, not less, information. What typically happens is that people are asked to use only a specific set of facts to form their judgments, but instead they also consider various contextual factors, such as how a question was framed or what was their emotional state at the time. Although this means they are taking into account information the experimenter may not have considered to be relevant, Paul Sharp and Isaac Fradkin from Eran Eldar’s lab demonstrate how this more complex form of inference can produce “rationally biased” judgements that benefit decision making in many contexts.
See full article here
