fires receive more media attention and thus are more easily brought to mind, people tend to respond by saying that fires kill more people than drowning. Even though these heuristics tend to work well, they can also be a source of error in many situations ( ). Also, these three heuristics only represent a few of the types of judgment biases that can greatly affect people’s reasoning abilities.Decision making is the process by which a person chooses one alternative over another, choosing a course of action. Because there are many ways in which a person can choose to behave, there are often errors. Oftentimes, when people think they are making the right decision, the wrong outcome can occur. There are many judgment biases that can affect which course of action a person chooses. The first bias is people’s tendency to be unrealistically confident, or overconfident, in the accuracy of their predictions or responses. As discussed by _______, the experiments performed by Baruch Fischoff and Donald MacGregor (1982) studied this bias by asking participants whether they believed that a certain event would occur. For example, they asked if a certain sports team would win an event. They would also question participants about the level of their confidence about this prediction. After the event in question had occurred, the accuracy of the predictions was compared with the confidence each participant assigned to the prediction. It was found that people’s confidence in their predictions was consistently greater than their accuracy. One reason overconfidence leads to inaccurate decision making is because, even in the presence of objective information that will help a person to overcome other biases and errors of judgment, overconfidence will make a person weight his or her own intuitions more heavily ( ). New research in the field of judgment biases focuses on biases in which people perceive themselves as more charitable,...
