Cognitive Biases In Riveted By Professor Davies

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Cognitive biases are tricks that the mind plays, which are experienced by all humans. These biases, also called heuristics, are a product of evolution. The human mind has adopted them in order to cope with the world and its events. They do, however, make humans quite irrational. One of these cognitive biases is called the “availability heuristic”. The availability heuristic was first introduced in the lecture specifically focused on cognitive biases. Professor Davies also writes about this bias in his book “Riveted”. This bias refers to the fact that humans believe that things that are easily called to memory are more common than they might actually be.
There are a lot of issues surrounding the availability heuristic. The main issue is that humans have an easier time remembering events or reports that had a strong emotional reaction, particularly if it was a negative emotion like anger or fear. This means that people overestimate their chances of something terrible happening to them, even if they have only heard about this horrible event a few times. In the book “Riveted”, Professor Davies uses the example of women in their forties believing they are at high risk for breast cancer. The news has covered breast cancer awareness extensively as of late, and this has caused escalated fear of the disease. The likelihood of …show more content…
The availability heuristic is almost manipulated by the news media. In “Riveted”, Professor Davies describes a feedback loop. He states “The availability heuristic makes us think the portrayed events are common, which makes us think they are important, which fuels our desire to know about them, which causes a feedback loop into the media”. The media uses the emotional reactions of humans to get higher amounts of views on the stories they report on. The availability heuristic will likely focus predominately on negative events that are common because of
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Confirmation Bias The book “Riveted”, by Professor Jim Davis briefly mentions briefly about a type of cognitive bias known as confirmation bias. Multiple studies have depicted that generally people tend to give exorbitant amount of appraisal to confirmatory information which is, data that’s supports one’s own point of view. The most likely reason for the exorbitant influence of confirmatory information is that it is very easy to deal with cognitively (Gilovich 1993). It is observed that it is much…

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