Confirmation, Availability and Additivity: Biases That Can Impact Us All
As I’m sure many of you have heard, Nobel Prize-winning and pioneering psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., died in late March 2024. He, along with Amos Tversky, is largely credited with founding and popularizing the field of behavioral economics, which has had a huge influence on diverse fields ranging from psychology to public policy to law to finance.
So, I thought I’d use this space to reflect on three biases that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately that have their roots in the work that Kahneman and his colleagues started. Two of them are classic — confirmation bias and availability bias. One is relatively new — let’s call it the “additive bias” — and has its grounding in the field that Kahneman helped found.
In all three cases, I love thinking about how the central insights apply to modern-day interactions between advisers and clients and how we might improve our lives (and the lives of our clients) if we attend to them more deeply.