HOW DO COGNITIVE BIASES CAUSE PROBLEMS FOR KNOWLEDGE
IN HISTORY?
cognition: conscious mental activities (thinking)
bias: an inclination or prejudice towards one perspective over another
cognitive biases:
- mental errors caused by our simplified information processing
strategies.
- they can limit our ability to acquire (gain) knowledge.
- some are the products of information-processing rules called heuristics
(mental shortcuts) used by the brain.
hindsight bias:
-
the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see it as predictable.
despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it.
“i-knew-it-all-along effect”
it was described and studied as such in the 1970s by psychologists who
were investing errors in human decision making.
source confusion:
- confuse memories with other information, creating distorted memories.
illusory correlation:
- the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables (e.g.
people, events, or behaviors) when no relationship exists.
sensory perception:
- any of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch by which the
body perceives an external stimulus.
Sensory perception can affect the way history or series of events is reported
and it changes the reliability of the knowledge of the event. Everyone’s
perspective has a chance of being false or a misconception, changing how
trustworthy the accounts are. We tend to remember only things that stick out
and maybe miss important details of an event, also making us forget things
over time. Also, our perceptions will change to what we would like to believe
had happened during the event.