For an interesting exercise, look for heuristics and resultant cognitive biases for one week, in your own thinking, colleagues, the news, etc. Examples would include some of the following:
<ul><li>The gambler’s fallacy (belief that there will be a corrective bias, e.g. “luck must break”)</li><li>Belief in small numbers (that sample sets are very alike and highly representative of the population)</li><li>Expectation that randomness does not carry patterns</li><li>Belief that portions of a distribution represent the distribution (like the second above)</li><li>Ignoring base data, i.e. prior probabilities, in determining likelihoods
</li><li>Ignoring the prediction of regression (it is unlikely that phenomenal performance will be followed by greater performance)</li></ul>I’m interested to see if and where these biases are ingrained in formal decision making systems in both business and public policy.