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There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question: David Deutsch (2005) "A new way to explain explanation", and Richard Dawkins (2009) "Why the universe seems so strange" At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and sometimes using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless ...

I don't know of a study that tries to answer your specific question but you might want to have a look at illusory superiority, "a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others" (wikipedia). I can especially recommend the paper by Dunning and Kruger ...

This is referred to as The Forer Effect after Bertram Forer. Wikipedia describes it accurately: The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum's observation that "we've got something for everyone") is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored ...

If you come to this question from the bayesian tradition, then there is only one place where you can sneak in bias: your prior. This dovetails nicely with the wikipedia definition: a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly ...

Bias can be quantified in many different ways. In human memory research carried out in the cognitive psychology tradition, there are simple ways to think about it. One basic measure of cognitive bias is merely called bias, and it's a measure of the absolute accuracy of an individual's probability judgments. You average probability judgments across a given ...

Confirmation bias (Wikipedia) also seems relevant: Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias, myside bias or verification bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect ...

In general, no. People with excellent memories can just as easily misapply the availability heuristic as people with poor memories. To see why, consider a situation where a reasoner is asked to estimate the relative frequency of murder and suicide. Because examples of murder or more "available" (i.e., more easily recalled) than examples of suicide, the ...

Your question is predicated on the assumption that Bayesian modeling has been successful in all domains. I think this is a stance that many (except hardened Bayesians) would disagree with. For instance, consider the classic Tversky & Shafir experiments on the violation of the sure thing principle: What are popular rationalist responses to Tversky & ...

One possible strategy is to phrase decision-making problems as questions in a foreign language. There's evidence that this attenuates at least certain kinds of cognitive bias (making you more rational and consistent) by distancing the cognitive and affective baggage that comes with the problem. See the following: Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S.L., & Sun, G.A. ...

There are many reasons why stated intention can differ from behaviour (e.g., see Theory of Planned Behaviour). Social desirability is one possibility. However, there are many other factors. A person may not know who they are going to vote for or may not have decided. Factors may arise between the point in time when asked and when voting occurs that change ...

This question is not answerable without having a measure of what the most common day-to-day scenarios are. However, I can try a guess: since most people interact in a public, anonymous setting on a daily basis, I would think the fundamental attribution error is most probable. This is especially true while driving -- "did that idiot just cut me off?!" ...

In a paper published recently (actually, today) by myself and my 2 advisers, we analyze results of an auditory perceptual discrimination task, and show that the Bayesian model can be used to explain some aspects of behaviour, but not others. We provide a simple heuristic model that accounts for a wider range of phenomena in that task, such as the imperfect ...

Jonathan Baron's book, "Thinking and Deciding", presents decision making, and most other thinking tasks, as a combination of searching and judgment. In most cases, expanding the search phase results in better thinking. In the case of decision making, searching further both for more alternatives before judging between them and for better information for ...