Essay Sample: Perceptual and Cognitive Bias in Intelligence Analysis and Decision-Making

This article mainly focuses on how our decisions are shaped by various biases without involvement of our consciousness mainly focusing on perception and cognition. Perception and cognition gives attention to a small part and excludes what is not in the scope of the decision maker's attention. Both the study of Intelligence analysis and decision making and cognitive bias in sports are used to evaluate the effect of perception and cognition in decision-making.

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Key Question

The very important issues addressed in the articles are the implications of using cognitive judgment and perception in important decision-making. This is through the use of a number of cases that may have employed heuristics in making judgments and how it gets to affect them.

Key Concepts

The piece explores fundamentals of perception and cognition and useful tools for intuitive judgment which include Representativeness which employs correspondence between the outcome and the inputs in its decision making. Representation is a stereotypical approach and can be through representativeness and illusion of validity and order, representativeness and misconception of chance and lastly representativeness and perception of cause and effect. Another heuristic explored is availability which depends upon the frequency and likelihood of event occurrence .The article also explores the use of anchoring as a heuristic that involves decision making with the focus on an anchor and making changes towards the expected ending. Anchoring involves use of pacesetters as suggestions and comparison.

These concepts are further explored through the shortcomings in the National Security decision making in its collection and analysis of National Intelligence. An example is given of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction where the Intelligence Community made a wrong turn by assuming that Iraq was set to reconstructing its ability to produce nuclear weapons and this led to declaring a war. The article analyzes impact of bias on perception and judgment, one which is representativeness in the analysis of Aluminum tubes used by Iraq and this lead to assuming making of chemical weapons. The study of the Samara Tanker Trucks also saw the Intelligence Community influenced by bias when they used a cause effect analysis that Iraq was making chemical weapons and this was a faulty reasoning. The impact of anchoring where assumptions were made from Iraq's past involvement in chemical and physical weapons clouded the judgment.

Cognitive Bias in Sports

In addition to that, the research on cognitive biases in sports reveals the confirmation bias whereby the coaches search for what satisfies their intuitions and totally ignore the contradictory beliefs .This is a very common cognitive tendency and it assists in a lot of explanations. The other one is, motivated reasoning which involves the tendency to scrutinize reasoning that is different from our own more than we investigate our own ideas. Team members and fans will always praise the teams they support and sham the teams they are opposing. Confirmation bias where one only has eyes for what is in line with their beliefs and motivated reasoning where coaches tend to look into ideas that are not contrary to their own may be detrimental to their success. Another example is where fans gladly post irrelevant facts after their teams have won victories not even knowing the exact explanations for their win, motivated reasoning.

Findings and conclusion

Well, decision making and Intelligence Analysis have proven to yield negative results under cognitive and perceptual bias. Similarly, in the sports sector heuristics can cause misjudgments .Decision making requires lots of reliable data and support ground and not just heuristics because they can be deceiving. However, heuristics also have positive impacts in some cases but cannot be relied on fully.

References

Senate Intelligence Committee (2004). Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's PreWar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Washington: Government Printing Office. http//blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/cognitive-biases-in-sports-the-irrationality-of-coaches-commentators-and-fans/?redirect=1