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IB DP Psychology — Cognitive Approach | SL & HL | Paper 1
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define cognitive bias, heuristic, the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic, and anchoring bias using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain how heuristics lead to systematic errors in judgement and why the human mind relies on mental shortcuts.
- Describe the role of cognitive schemas and prior experience in shaping biased decision-making.
- Evaluate research evidence for cognitive biases using supporting and opposing studies in ACAS format.
- Apply cognitive bias concepts to a real-world case study from the cognitive perspective.
- Discuss the extent to which cognitive biases provide a complete explanation of flawed human decision-making.
- Analyse cognitive bias research using relevant concept areas: Bias, Causality, Measurement, and Perspective.
Introduction & Context
Imagine you are choosing between two hospitals for a minor procedure. A friend tells you that her neighbour had a terrible experience at Hospital A last month. Despite the fact that Hospital A has a 97% patient satisfaction rating based on thousands of reviews, you find yourself leaning toward Hospital B. Why? You have not done any systematic analysis — you have simply been influenced by a single, vivid story that came easily to mind. This is not irrationality in the dramatic sense; it is something far more ordinary and far more universal.
Psychologists have long been fascinated by the gap between how humans think they make decisions and how they actually do. Classical economic theory assumed that people are rational agents who weigh all available information carefully before choosing. But decades of psychological research have revealed a very different picture: human judgement is routinely shaped by predictable, systematic errors. These errors are not random — they follow patterns. Understanding those patterns is the central concern of the study of cognitive biases in decision-making.
🔍 Analogy — The Faulty Compass Think of your decision-making mind as a compass. Most of the time it points you in roughly the right direction, and it does so quickly and efficiently. But the compass has a built-in magnetic flaw — it consistently veers a few degrees off true north under certain conditions. You might not notice the error on a short walk, but over a long journey, that small, consistent deviation leads you somewhere very different from where you intended. Cognitive biases are that magnetic flaw: small, systematic, and consequential.
Core Concepts
Before we can understand why decisions go wrong, we need to understand how the mind tries to make them go right. The human brain processes an enormous volume of information every second. If we deliberated carefully over every single choice — from what to eat for breakfast to whether to trust a stranger — we would be paralysed. The mind solves this problem by developing shortcuts: efficient rules of thumb that allow fast, low-effort judgements. These shortcuts are called heuristics.
📖 Key Definition — Heuristic A heuristic is a mental shortcut or rule of thumb that allows individuals to make quick judgements and decisions without engaging in exhaustive analysis. Heuristics are cognitively efficient and often produce accurate results, but they can also lead to systematic errors in reasoning.
The concept of heuristics was