Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Salience and accessibility also color how we perceive our social worlds, which may have a big influence on our
behavior. For instance, people who watch a lot of violent television shows also view the world as more dangerous
(Doob & Macdonald, 1979), [31] probably because violence becomes more cognitively accessible for them. We also
unfairly overestimate our contribution to joint projects (Ross & Sicoly, 1979), [32]perhaps in part because our own
contributions are highly accessible, whereas the contributions of others are much less so.
Even people who should know better, and who need to know better, are subject to cognitive biases. Economists, stock
traders, managers, lawyers, and even doctors make the same kinds of mistakes in their professional activities that
people make in their everyday lives (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002). [33] Just like us, these people are victims of
overconfidence, heuristics, and other biases.
Furthermore, every year thousands of individuals, such as Ronald Cotton, are charged with and often convicted of
crimes based largely on eyewitness evidence. When eyewitnesses testify in courtrooms regarding their memories of a
crime, they often are completely sure that they are identifying the right person. But the most common cause of
innocent people being falsely convicted is erroneous eyewitness testimony (Wells, Wright, & Bradfield, 1999). [34] The
many people who were convicted by mistaken eyewitnesses prior to the advent of forensic DNA and who have now
been exonerated by DNA tests have certainly paid for all-too-common memory errors (Wells, Memon, & Penrod,
2006). [35]
Although cognitive biases are common, they are not impossible to control, and psychologists and other scientists are
working to help people make better decisions. One possibility is to provide people with better feedback about their
judgments. Weather forecasters, for instance, learn to be quite accurate in their judgments because they have clear
feedback about the accuracy of their predictions. Other research has found that accessibility biases can be reduced by
leading people to consider multiple alternatives rather than focus only on the most obvious ones, and particularly by
leading people to think about opposite possible outcomes than the ones they are expecting (Lilienfeld, Ammirtai, &
Landfield, 2009). [36] Forensic psychologists are also working to reduce the incidence of false identification by helping
police develop better procedures for interviewing both suspects and eyewitnesses (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay,
2001).[37]^