The puzzle of contextual biases: Why can’t we ignore irrelevant information
Abstract Humans are prone to biases when a seemingly irrelevant context influences our decisions. For example, imagine looking for an apartment in a new city. After finding a very nice house that you unfortunately cannot afford (an irrelevant option), the others might start to look less favorably in comparison. Such biases affect not just complex high-level decisions, such as which apartment to buy, but also the very basic processes of perception and memory. But why do such biases occur? Why can't we see or remember things accurately even in seemingly simple tasks? In this talk, I will present a computational model* that I recently developed to answer this question and the results of experiments testing some of the model predictions. I will also discuss the parallels between biases in economic and social decision-making and in low-level cognition, and whether these two lines of research can be united.