Because of this, subtle biases can creep in and influence the way you see and think about the world. The concept of cognitive bias was first introduced by researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Since then, researchers have described a number of different types of biases that affect decision-making in a wide range of areas including social behavior, cognition, behavioral economics, education, management, healthcare, business, and finance.

People sometimes confuse cognitive biases with logical fallacies, but the two are not the same. A logical fallacy stems from an error in a logical argument, while a cognitive bias is rooted in thought processing errors often arising from problems with memory, attention, attribution, and other mental mistakes.

Cognitive biases are inherent in the way we think, and many of them are unconscious. Identifying the biases you experience and purport in your everyday interactions is the first step to understanding how our mental processes work, which can help us make better, more informed decisions

In some contexts, Faith is simply belief without evidence. But this is only a starting point. Faith has two primary meanings. It can be used as a synonym for trust in the secular world, and notably, in a more dogmatic sense, for all-or-nothing belief in, and personal commitment to God or Allah, that is central to most denominations of Christianity and Islam respectively. This is a good example of the polysemy of language.

In questioning some of their own student knowledge claims and in the knowledge as justified true belief session it soon emerges that truth is a slippery concept. Absolute certainty has an initial attraction to many beginning TOK students seeking a chimeric foundation; but it soon emerges that the word “truth” can be used in various ways and in differing contexts.We have already stressed that TOK is not text-based philosophy. It is much more about our Shared Knowledge—what the practitioners in the various Areas of Knowledge actually do, than it is about metaphysics and eternal questions. For example History is what historians actually do. It is not every last detail of what actually happened. Naturally, academic historians aim for truth in interpreting the traces of a past long gone; but they are realistic and fully aware of the inherent limitations of their discipline.

As embodied, fallible, human knowers we will nearly always be at some distance from "what is actually the case" or "things as they are in themselves." As the course progresses TOK students will embrace this constraint. Not being able to attain it, does not mean that TOK students should shy away from understanding some of various ways the word truth is used. Some facility with the three most famous iterations will be very useful for analyzing TOK Knowledge Questions.

Phineas Gage

This traditional unpacking of the idea of knowledge follows naturally after the Student knowledge claims. The Wittgenstein and the polysemy of language unit will also inform the class activities presented below; especially for differentiating between opinion and belief.   

TRUE:The knowledge claim is True rather than False. It corresponds to the real world. It is a fact. It is “what is the case.”

JUSTIFIED:The knowledge claim is justified with adequate evidence. Justification requires Coherence with previous data and Clarity with regard to language and logic. There can be no Contradiction or strong Counter evidence.

This first written assignments requires students, in the first weeks of TOK, to grapple with the distinctions between propositional knowledge and various kinds of direct experience. Students are on their own with this in-class written assignment. No previous formal class time has been devoted to introducing these ideas. The assignment represents a very gentle first encounter with TOK writing expectations. The students, unprimed in medias res, usually perform very well and emerge with confidence to tackle the more challenging writing assignments ahead. A selection of the more provocative student responses can be published as stimulus material for short discussion next time the class meets. This echoes the teaching strategy introduced in the Student Knowledge Claims session.

Once understood and appropriated by students the capability/fallibility dualism is a powerful notion that can be used in various TOK contexts. Appreciating the positive aspects of knowing is a great example. A skeptical mindset, with regard to limitations and bias, is a central part of the TOK critical thinking toolkit. But focusing almost entirely on the weaknesses and fallibility of knowledge claims loses sight of our capability. There are many positive aspects of knowledge and there is tremendous pleasure in finding things out. The accumulated edifice of shared human ideas—loosely, the Areas of Knowledge—merits nothing less than awe and astonishment.

TOK is a natural vehicle for students to gain familiarity with their own learning modalities and idiosyncrasies; including recognizing what strategies and habits work best, and how emotional factors come into play. This meta-awareness can result in new levels of agency and confidence.Awareness of oneself entails better understanding of the differing perspectives of others. We are each of us unique. This uniqueness arises from a common human predicament. We are embodied knowers, contingent in time and space, embedded in specific linguistic, cultural and historic contexts. Awareness of this invites a pluralism which recognizes the richness of differing, sometimes parallel perspectives and assumptions.  

Intuition allows us make judgments in the blink of an eye without careful deliberation or systematic analysis of all the available facts. We trust our “gut” reactions and first impressions. They enable us to discern the sincerity of a conversation partner, read the prevailing ambience in a room or feel a sense of impending doom. These insights or early warning "survival" mechanisms are palpable and we ignore them at our peril. They are only irrational in the sense that the cognitive fragments (some of them non-linguistic) and experiential memories that support them remain largely hidden.

The science of pattern recognition has been explored for hundreds of years, with the primary goal of optimally extracting patterns from data or situations, and effectively separating one pattern from another. Applications of pattern recognition are found everywhere, whether it’s categorizing disease, predicting outbreaks of disease, identifying individuals (through face or speech recognition), or classifying data. In fact, pattern recognition is so ingrained in many things we do, we often forget that it’s a unique discipline which must be treated as such if we want to really benefit from it.

There are, however, others who declare that these claims are not of the Natural Sciences. A knowledge claim in the natural sciences needs to be falsifiable in order to be tested, and claims regarding a multiverse are not falsifiable. This view of science is most closely associated with the philosopher of science Karl Popper and more recently by Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson claims that the multiverse theory, and others like it, do not fall under “science”, but “philosophy”. He claims that in physics, for example, a concept constitutes knowledge if it accurately predicts the future and can be tested empirically. Questions about why certain models work can be discussed and debated over dinner, but those ‘why’ questions are not scientific. We can predict where the moon will be at any given time on the strength of our equations, but questions about why those equations work are for philosophers if they cannot be answered with a falsifiable claim.

The natural sciences rely heavily on reason, in particular inductive reasoning. The statement, “all bodies observed so far obey Newton’s law of gravity” has been used to justify a believe in Newton’s law of gravity. Belief structures like this are the backbone of Natural Science, but there are notable philosophers of science who are quick to point out the fallacy of induction. David Hume, for example, questioned the assumption he referred to as the “uniformity of nature”. In short, simply because all observed bodies follow a pattern tell us nothing of unobserved bodies, and the “uniformity of nature” (the belief that nature behaves uniformly) cannot be proven. This brings us to....

In the study of TOK in DP-1 (11th grade), I have learnt about the ways of knowing, and two of the areas of knowledge - natural sciences and human sciences. Of all the discussions and explorations done into these areas of knowledge, there can be patterns observed in the methods of experimentation, data collection, data analysis and also assumptions being made when generalizing situations. In some of the above points, human sciences is similar to natural sciences, while in the others, the ideologies and working is different.

Natural sciences and human sciences for instance both use experiments as a form of data collection but the methods and outputs are different. Natural scientists have lesser moral values to take care of compared to human scientists such as psychologists. Psychologists are directly dealing with humans and hence need to take more ethical implications into consideration. Secondly, human scientists conduct experiments on a large set of people - not limited to one race or gender unless it is required. Natural scientists do not require survey type data. Here, a single scientist conducts the experiments. Both the types of experiments are empirical based though, direct experimentation is more in natural sciences while human sciences are more observation based. But experiments in human sciences have more unpredictable results due to what is known as the Hawthorne effect. This effect explains that when a particular group comes to know that they are under observation for a experiment or an analysis, they tend to be more productive. These cause errors in results of human science experiments especially the ones of psychology.

Should economics study the psychological basis of agents’ choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between ‘mentalist’ answers to this question and rival ‘behavioural’ answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the ‘functionalist’ variety [Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2016). Mentalism versus behaviourism in economics: A philosophy-of-science perspective. Economics and Philosophy, 32(2), 249–281. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267115000462]. Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input–output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some risky commitments about the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions.

This controversy over the proper role of psychological concepts, explanations and evidence in economics is multifaceted and profoundly indeterminate, this paper will argue. In what way multifaceted? One facet of this controversy is the issue of whether economics should study the anatomical structures in the brain that underlie decision-making (Section 3). A second facet is the issue of whether economics should study the causes and effects of cognitive variables (Section 4). A third facet, I suggest, is the issue of whether economics should study the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions (Section 6).

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!”

"Psychology and economics are both interested in how people make decisions, but have different theories and methods. In our work with economists at Northwestern, Michigan, the Federal Reserve and elsewhere, we have found ways to complement each other's expertise," said Wändi Bruine de Bruin, professor of behavioral decision making at Leeds' University Business School, who received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is collaborating professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Leading economics scholars consider the influence of psychology on economics, discussing topics including pro-social behavior, conditional trust, neuroeconomics, procedural utility, and happiness research.

Summary Leading economics scholars consider the influence of psychology on economics, discussing topics including pro-social behavior, conditional trust, neuroeconomics, procedural utility, and happiness research. The integration of economics and psychology has created a vibrant and fruitful emerging field of study. The essays in Economics and Psychology take a broad view of the interface between these two disciplines, going beyond the usual focus on "behavioral economics." As documented in this volume, the influence of psychology on economics has been responsible for a view of human behavior that calls into question the assumption of complete rationality (and raises the possibility of altruistic acts), the acceptance of experiments as a valid method of economic research, and the idea that utility or well-being can be measured.

Judging from mass media treatment of economic affairs — be it in a recession, in a more serious depression or in an upswing period — there should be ample room for psychology when economic issues are dealt with. Economists who appear in the public eye as authors of articles or as interviewees often stress the importance of psychological factors