Cognitive Biases that Increase with Education
August 28th, 2009
We usually think of education as reducing misconceptions and poor reasoning. However, it appears this is not always the case. Cognitive biases are those “short cuts” in thinking we take that save cognitive effort, but often cause us to reach erroneous conclusions. For example, the bandwagon effect is the tendency to believe something because many other people do; the confirmation bias causes us to seek out information that confirms our previously held beliefs.
Morsanyi, Primi, Chiesi, & Handley investigated the effects of instruction in statistics on two cognitive biases:
Representativeness heuristic – this tool leads people to associate items or people with groups that they seem similar to. The classic example is given a description of a fastidious, intelligent, mechanical person, people are likely to indicate he is highly likely to be an engineer, despite the low percentage of individuals who really are engineers.
Equiprobability bias – this is the tendency for people to think of random events as equally probable, even if they occur with different probabilities. For example, people will judge the chance of picking a boy or a girl’s name out of a hat to be equal even if there are 4 girl’s names and 8 boy’s names.
The authors investigated the effects of both individual characteristics and statistics education on the use of these biases. Overall, there was actually an increase in the equiprobability bias with statistics education. The authors hypothesize that the students learn just enough about probability theory to misuse it. As we say, “they know enough to be dangerous.” As support for this theory, they note that higher ability students were less likely to show the bias after instruction, suggesting that those with lower ability are more likely to misunderstand how to apply the probability theory they have been taught.
I think this is an example of an interesting phenomenon that occurs when we first start to learn something; we may actually get worse at it. Totally anecdotally, the first time I play a Wii game, I’m usually not that good, but often do OK. I don’t use any strategy, just react to whatever is there. Then, the second or third time I play, I have a better idea of what I am supposed to do and be focused on, but I don’t have anything automatized and I often do worse trying to focus on all those things. It takes more practice with the skills and task for me to again start to improve with it.
Also interesting was that people tended to show the bias more when asked questions about people (e.g., how likely is it that Joe…”) than about objects (e.g., how likely is it that a coin flip…). The authors hypothesize that students are more likely to think about people as agents to which they attribute greater unpredictability, thus leading to the idea that all actions are of equal probability. I think this is a very important point; there is a resistance to applying probability principles to people, as if it somehow takes away their “free will.”
Finally, it was noted that use of the representativeness heuristic did decrease IF students receive explicit instruction about the heuristic. This instruction, however, did not generalize to other cognitive biases.
I’ve been interested in these cognitive shortcuts that we all take using various heuristics, and the experiments researchers do to demonstrate them, and where they may fail us. Kahneman and Tversky’s book Judgment Under Uncertainty is a good read if you’re interested.
Morsanyi, K., Primi, C., Chiesi, F., & Handley, S. (2009). The effects and side-effects of statistics education: Psychology students’ (mis-)conceptions of probability Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34 (3), 210-220 DOI: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2009.05.001
Posted in Students | Comments (1)
One Response to “Cognitive Biases that Increase with Education”
Leave a Reply
Recent Posts
- Games and Simulation in Science
- Simulations and Labs: Either/or?
- Open Source, E-Textbooks, Traditional Texts… oh my!
- Predicting eLearning Dropout
- Development of Help-Seeking
Categories
- Assessment (3)
- Curriculum and Materials (5)
- Policy/ Government (2)
- Publication (1)
- Research Methods (4)
- Schools (1)
- Students (13)
- Teachers (8)
- Technology (8)
- Uncategorized (3)
September 14th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
[...] check out this post on ribbonfarm. To see why my testing and exploring might get me nowhere, see this tidbit on the connections blog. I’m not sure if I want to dedicate a post to the subject mentioned there as well. [...]