COSTS AND BENEFITS OF JUDGMENT ERRORS - IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBIASING

Some authors questioned the ecological validity of judgmental biases demonstrated in the laboratory. One objection to these demonstrations is that evolutionary pressures would have rendered such maladaptive behaviors extinct if they had any impact in the "real world." I attempt to show that even beneficial adaptations may have costs. I extend this argument to propose three types of judgment errors-strategy-based errors, association-based errors, and psychophysical based errors-each of which is a cost of a highly adaptive system. This taxonomy of judgment behaviors is used to advance hypotheses as to which debiasing techniques are likely to succeed in each category.