Hypothesized causes of some cognitive biases

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Bias arises from various mental processes that may overlap. These may include:

Heuristics
Information-processing shortcuts

• Availability heuristic 
  
• Recognition heuristic
  
• Inference from rudimentary data
• Inertia

Schema Influences

• Social customs 
  
• Cultural values
• Ethical
• Ideological

Unconscious Processing

• Unconscious Automaticity
  
• Priming and prior conditioning

Egocentric Bias

• Self-perception theory
  
• Introspection illusion
• Cognitive dissonance
• Positive Illusions
  

Perceptual distortions

• Anosognosia
  

Reasoning Glitches

• Logical fallacies
  
• Syllogistic errors

Linguistic Differences

• Literalism
  
• Concrete thinking
  

Evolutionary Pressures

Bounded Rationality

• Misinterpretations or misuse of statistics
  
• Naive Realism  
  
• Folk science

Informational Constraints

• Mental noise
  
• Attentional biases 
  
• Processing capacity limits

Error Management

• Directional bias
  
• Compression and coding

Emotion and Motivation

• Needs
• Drives
• Defenses
  
• Unseen motives
• Loss Aversion
• Threats
• Reward
• Addiction

Meaning Generation

• Salience and valence glitches
  
• Overtagging and oversignifying
• Sense of certainty
  
• Gap-filling
• Esthetic Preferences

Misattributions

• Attribute substitution
  
• Attribution theory

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Attribute substitution

“Attribute substitution” explains many other reasoning biases. A common and important type of attribute substitution is the use of the “inside view”—that when asked to make judgments about various qualities, we query our own phenomenological experiences, or run our own mental simulations of events, and provide that as the “answer.”

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Unconscious Automaticity

From procedural knowledge and reflexes to unconsciousness decision-making, we can react to the outside world with immediate implicit assumptions, knowledge, intuition and models.

• Robert Zajonc
• John Bargh
  
• Daniel Wegner
  

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Perceptual distortions

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Linguistic Differences

People may process language in more literal or concrete ways and miss subtle, metaphorical messages and nuances of meaning. 

Bounded rationality

The expert mind can be highly trained to sift through evidence in a particular field and yet hold commonly-found naive assumptions and limited views in other areas of inquiry.

We do not necessarily transfer our capacity to optimally reason across domains. Michael Jordan did not transfer his exceptional basketball skills to his attempt at professional baseball. 

For each area, we may need different skills and to build a unique knowledge base, with contextual and relational understanding that applies to that realm. Learning to synthesize and integrate ideas in multi-disciplines is also a particular skill.

• Herbert Simon
  
• Daniel Kahneman
  
• Ariel Rubinstein
  
• Gerd Gigerenzer
  
• Edward Tsang
  

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Informational Constraints

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Reasoning Glitches

We are all vulnerable to having circumscribed reasoning impairments that remain hidden without sensitive neuropsychological testing. Also, inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning use different pathways in the brain and require specific skill-development.

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Drives

• Drives for status, acceptance, power, approval, novelty, pleasure, membership, being special.

• Drives to avoid the discomfort of criticism, humiliation, rejection, disappointment. 

• Fears of being a "sucker", wasting our emotional investment, being manipulated, losing control, being exposed as an "imposter"
  

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Meaning Generation