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is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.

Ignorance is power

Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied

Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.

If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.

Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.

conomic models often give people credit for being what may seem at a glance an unexceptional thing: fully rational beings pursuing our own self-interest. But as psychologists, such as 2002 Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, and behavioral economists, such as 2017 laureate Richard H. Thaler, have pointed out, an assortment of biases, heuristics, and other factors often move us to behave in ways that seem distinctly irrational. Can social science’s understanding of how humans think and act be used to predict how markets will behave?

Although the responses tended to affirm the predictive power of behavioral economics, members of both panels reiterated that fully rational models still have an important place in economics. Pol Antras of Harvard, who agreed with the statement, added, “Still, models with fully rational agents provide a perfectly good approximation for explaining many market outcomes!”

A cognitive bias is a flaw in your reasoning that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you and to come to an inaccurate conclusion. Because you are flooded with information from millions of sources throughout the day, your brain develops ranking systems to decide which information deserves your attention and which information is important enough to store in memory. It also creates shortcuts meant to cut down on the time it takes for you to process information. The problem is that the shortcuts and ranking systems aren’t always perfectly objective because their architecture is uniquely adapted to your life experiences

Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely heavily on the first information you learn when you are evaluating something. In other words, what you learn early in an investigation often has a greater impact on your judgment than information you learn later. In one study, for example, researchers gave two groups of study participants some written background information about a person in a photograph. Then they asked them to describe how they thought the people in the photos were feeling. People who read more negative background information tended to infer more negative feelings, and people who read positive background information tended to infer more positive feelings. Their first impressions heavily influenced their ability to infer emotions in others.

Another common bias is the tendency to give greater credence to ideas that come to mind easily. If you can immediately think of several facts that support a judgment, you may be inclined to think that judgment is correct. For example, if a person sees multiple headlines about shark attacks in a coastal area, that person might form a belief that the risk of shark attacks is higher than it is.The American Psychological Association points out that when information is readily available around you, you’re more likely to remember it. Information that is easy to access in your memory seems more reliable.

Confirmation Bias is the tendency to look for information that supports, rather than rejects, one’s preconceptions, typically by interpreting evidence to confirm existing beliefs while rejecting or ignoring any conflicting data (American Psychological Association).

experiment by Peter Watson (1960) in which the subjects were to find the experimenter’s rule for sequencing numbers.Its results showed that the subjects chose responses that supported their hypotheses while rejecting contradictory evidence, and even though their hypotheses were not correct, they became confident in them quickly (Gray, 2010, p. 356).Though such evidence of the confirmation bias has appeared in psychological literature throughout history, the term ‘confirmation bias’ was first used in a 1977 paper detailing an experimental study on the topic (Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1977).

This type of confirmation bias explains people’s search for evidence in a one-sided way to support their hypotheses or theories.Experiments have shown that people provide tests/questions that are designed to yield “yes” if their favored hypothesis was true, and ignore alternative hypotheses that are likely to give the same result.This is also known as congruence heuristic (Baron, 2000, p.162-64). Though the preference for affirmative questions itself may not be bias, there are experiments that have shown that congruence bias does exist.

Confirmation bias (Wason, 1960) occurs when people seek out or evaluate information in a way that fits with their existing thinking and preconceptions. The domain of science, where theories should advance based on both falsifying and supporting evidence, has not been immune to bias, which is often associated with people processing hypotheses in ways that end up confirming them (Oswald & Grosjean, 2004). Similarly, a consumer who likes a particular brand and researches a new purchase may be motivated to seek out customer reviews on the internet that favor that brand. Confirmation bias has also been related to unmotivated processes, including primacy effects and anchoring, evident in a reliance on information that is encountered early in a process (Nickerson, 1998).

In this scenario, your decision was affected by

confirmation bias. With this, you interpret market information in a way that confirms your preconceptions – instead of seeing it objectively – and you make wrong decisions as a result. Confirmation bias is one of many psychological biases to which we're all susceptible when we make decisions. In this article, we'll look at common types of bias, and we'll outline what you can do to avoid them.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky introduced the concept of psychological bias in the early 1970s. They published their findings in their 1982 book, "Judgment Under Uncertainty." They explained that psychological bias – also known as cognitive bias – is the tendency to make decisions or take action in an illogical way. For example, you might subconsciously make selective use of data, or you might feel pressured to make a decision by powerful colleagues. Psychological bias is the opposite of common sense and clear, measured judgment. It can lead to missed opportunities and poor decision making.

Not only are machines rapidly catching up to — and exceeding — humans in terms of raw computing power, they are also starting to do things that we used to consider inherently human

Quite simply, humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines. They have the ability to recognize many different types of patterns - and then transform these "recursive probabalistic fractals" into concrete, actionable steps.

Intelligence, then, is really just a matter of being able to store more patterns than anyone else

By nature, human beings are illogical and irrational.

survival meant thinking quickly, not methodically. Making a life-saving decision was more important than making a 100% accurate one, so the human brain developed an array of mental shortcuts.

these shortcuts -- called cognitive biases or heuristics -- are numerous and innate.