The heuristics and biases program focused on what people have in common, not on how they differ. It showed that the processes that cause judgment errors are widely shared. Partly because of this history, people who are familiar with the notion of psychological bias often assume that it always produces statistical bias, a term we use in this book to mean measurements or judgments that mostly deviate from the truth in the same direction. Indeed, psychological biases create statistical bias when they are broadly shared. However, psychological biases create system noise when judges are biased in
...more
