Topic: systematic biases

A key purpose of causal reasoning by individuals and by collectives is to enhance action, to give humans yet more control over their environment. As a result, causal reasoning serves as the infrastructure of both thought and discourse. Humans represent causal systems accurately in some ways, but also show some systematic biases (we tend to neglect causal pathways other than the one we are thinking about). Even when accurate, people’s understanding of causal systems tends to be superficial; we depend on our communities for most of our causal knowledge and reasoning. Nevertheless, we are better

Systematic biases in perception can be either attractive or repulsive with respect to the immediate spatial or temporal context. There is an extensive amount of literature [1,2,3] on how to explain these differences in biases with a variety of mechanisms, ranging from sensory adaptation over efficient coding to various flavors of probabilistic estimation, variably called Bayesian or predictive or optimal. Here we want to demonstrate with several examples that some reasons for attraction vs. repulsion have been overlooked, neglected, or not acknowledged for specific domains. One example for st