Cognitive bias

Cognitive bias refers to a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science, including very basic statistical and memory errors that are common to all human beings (first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) and drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. They also significantly effect the scientific method which is deliberately designed to minimize such bias from any one observer.

Bias arises from various life, loyalty and local risk and attention concerns that are difficult to separate or codify. The fields of behavioral finance, behavioral psychology and neuropsychology attempt to identify risk and reward factors, conditioning, and neural structures by which bias arises. None truly succeed in eliminating it, but it can be systematically reduced by such methods as reproducing experiments in diverse places with diverse apparatus (minimizing also infrastructure bias), adversarial advocacy, peer review, and a competitive environment to produce results invalidating each other's work.

In his article "On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", 1960,Eugene Wigner noted in a footnote that it might be necessary to somehow determine whether other species saw the universe as we did, to get to objective answers free of human cognitive bias.

Some theorists think that mathematical notation itself may contain a strong human cognitive bias - a common theme in the philosophy of mathematics - and a few have attempted to create a cognitive science of mathematics to clearly bind together basic constants and operations in mathematics to human cognitive assumptions (about the body and its movements and negotiations). A more profound understanding of cognitive bias is expected to result from this.

However behavioral psychology and artificial intelligence studies in the 20th century had a similar agenda, and both more or less failed to explain more than a bare minimum of animal and planning behavior respectively.