Confirmation Bias

In our everyday lives we constantly make decisions such as what should I wear today? Or what should I make for supper? There are also the important life decisions that are made such as what should I become when I grow up? Should I get married? Or Should I work or finish up college? Decision-making is a way of problem solving where we select what it is that we want to be seen done from the available alternatives that there could be. Often times we may think that we approach decision making in a logical way, but underlying biases in our thinking often cramp our ability to make more rational decisions. One example of a bias is the confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to maintain allegiance to your initial hypothesis despite strong …show more content…
Sometimes jurors do not reconsider that decision even when there is strong evidence presented at trial stating otherwise. The representative heuristic, the availability heuristic, and the anchoring and adjustment heuristic are examples of biases in the way we think that can lead us to make bad decisions.
The representative heuristic refers to a heuristic or problem solving-strategy in which you judge the likelihood of an event by finding a comparable known event and assuming the probabilities will be similar. We ignore the true probability, or base rate of events in favor of our judgments (Matlin, 2013). A real life situation where a person might use the representative heuristic to make a decision would be when we go to view a college for the first time. A young lady attended a college tour for a college that she wanted to go to. During the tour, she stopped at the admissions office to ask questions but instead she turned around and went the other way. She saw a group of students wearing dark sunglasses, leather jackets and had body piercings. The group fit the mental representation of what is known to be “biker dudes”. So the young lady automatically classified those students into that