User:User120607/sandbox

Salience bias[edit]

Salience Bias Example: attention is drawn to the second image due to the more prominent color (red), as opposed to the less vivid color (light blue) of the first image, biased to the more salient stimulus.

Salience bias (also referred to as perceptual salience) is a cognitive bias that predisposes individuals to focus on or attend to items, information, or stimuli that are more prominent, visible, or emotionally striking. This is as opposed to stimuli that are unremarkable, or less salient, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines the salience hypothesis as a theory regarding perception where “motivationally significant” information is more readily perceived than information with little or less significant motivational importance. Perceptual salience (salience bias) is linked to the vividness effect, whereby a more pronounced response is produced by a more vivid perception of a stimulus than the mere knowledge of the stimulus. Salience bias assumes that more dynamic, conspicuous, or distinctive stimuli engage attention more than less prominent stimuli, disproportionately impacting decision making, it is a bias which favors more salient information.

Application

Cognitive Psychology

Salience bias, like all other cognitive biases, is an applicable concept to various disciplines. For example, cognitive psychology investigates cognitive functions and processes, such as perception, attention, memory, problem solving, and decision making, all of which could be influenced by salience bias. Salience bias acts to combat cognitive overload by focusing attention on prominent stimuli, which affects how individuals perceive the world as other, less vivid stimuli that could add to or change this perception, are ignored. Human attention gravitates towards novel and relevant stimuli and unconsciously filters out less prominent information, demonstrating salience bias, which influences behavior, as human behavior is affected by what is attended to. Behavioral economists Tversky and Kahneman also suggest that the retrieval of instances is influenced by their salience, such as how witnessing or experiencing an event first-hand has a greater impact than when it is less salient, like if it were read about, implying that memory is affected by salience.

Language

It is also relevant in language understanding and acquisition. Focusing on more salient phenomena allows people to detect language patterns and dialect variations more easily, making dialect categorization more efficient.

Social Behavior

Furthermore, social behaviors and interactions can also be influenced by perceptual salience. Changes in the perceptual salience of an individual heavily influences their social behavior and subjective experience of their social interactions, confirming a “social salience effect”. Social salience relates to how individuals perceive and respond to other people.

Behavioral Science

The connection between salience bias and other heuristics, like availability and representativeness, links it to the fields of behavioral science and behavioral economics. Salience bias is closely related to the availability heuristic in behavioral economics, based on the influence of information vividness and visibility, such as recency or frequency, on judgements, for example:

Accessibility and salience are closely related to availability, and they are important as well. If you have personally experienced a serious earthquake, you’re more likely to believe that an earthquake is likely than if you read about it in a weekly magazine. Thus, vivid and easily imagined causes of death (for example, tornadoes) often receive inflated estimates of probability, and less-vivid causes (for example, asthma attacks) receive low estimates, even if they occur with a far greater frequency (here, by a factor of twenty). Timing counts too: more recent events have a greater impact on our behavior, and on our fears, than earlier ones. — Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008-04-08)

Humans have bounded rationality, which refers to their limited ability to be rational in decision making, due to a limited capacity to process information and cognitive ability. Heuristics, such as availability, are employed to reduce the complexity of cognitive and social tasks or judgements, in order to decrease the cognitive load that result from bounded rationality. Despite the effectiveness of heuristics in doing so, they are limited by systematic errors that occur, often the result of influencing biases, such as salience. This can lead to misdirected or misinformed judgements, based on an overemphasis or overweighting of certain, more salient information. For example, the irrational behavior of procrastination occurs because costs in the present, like sacrificing free time, are disproportionately salient to future costs, because at that time they are more vivid. The more prominent information is more readily available than the less salient information, and thus has a larger impact on decision making and behavior, resulting in errors in judgement.

Other fields such as philosophy, economics, finance, and political science have also investigated the effects of salience, such as in relation to taxes, where salience bias is applied to real-world behaviors, affecting systems like the economy. The existence of salience bias in humans can make behavior more predictable and this bias can be leveraged to influence behavior, such as throughnudges.

Evaluation

Salience bias is one of many explanations for why humans deviate from rational decision making: by being overly focused on or biased to the most visible data and ignoring other potentially important information that could result in a more reasonable judgment. As a concept it is supported in psychological and economic literature, through its relationship with the availability heuristic outlined by Tversky and Kahneman, and its applicability to behaviors relevant to multiple disciplines, such as economics.

Despite this support, salience bias is limited for various reasons, one example being its difficulty in quantifying, operationalizing, and universally defining. Salience is often confused with other terms in literature, for example, one article states that salience, which is defined as a cognitive bias referring to “visibility and prominence”, is often confused with terms like transparency and complexity in public finance literature. This limits salience bias as the confusion negates its importance as an individual term, and therefore the influence it has on tax related behavior. Likewise, the APA definition of salience refers to motivational importance, which is based on subjective judgement, adding to the difficulty. According to psychologist S. Taylor “some people are more salient than others” and these differences can further bias judgements.  

Biased judgements have far-reaching consequences, beyond poor decision making, such as overgeneralizing and stereotyping. Studies into solo status or token integration demonstrate this. The token is an individual in a group different to the other members in that social environment, like a female in an all-male workplace. The token is viewed as symbolic of their social group, whereby judgments made about the solo individual predict judgements of their social group, which can result in inaccurate perceptions of that group and potential stereotyping. The distinctiveness of the individual in that environment “fosters a salience bias” and hence predisposes those generalized judgements, positive or negative.