Adaptive Biases in the Wild: Advancing Our Understanding of the Nature of Biases

Bias is most often seen as a flaw: people are said to “suffer” from biases and need to be “debiased.” Yet a bias, defined simply as a systematic deviation from a norm or standard, can in principle have negative, neutral, or positive meanings and consequences. While the dominant research tradition has emphasized pejorative interpretations by documenting violations of coherence norms such as logic or probability, other perspectives highlight how biases can also be functional and adaptive. This special issue brings together a set of contributions that theorize and provide or discuss empirical evidence on when and why biases may be adaptive. The articles address diverse domains, including framing effects, confirmation bias, reinforcement learning, gambling heuristics, overconfidence, competence attrition in language learning and organizational practices, and the bias blind spot. Together, they show that adaptive biases may not be rare exceptions but a pervasive feature of human cognition and behavior. The articles draw parallels with other pervasive behavioral regularities often conceptualized as biases and lay the foundation for future research on the boundary conditions of the adaptive nature of some biases, the cultural and institutional influences that shape the biases, the interplay between adaptive processes and outcomes, and the emergence and adaptivity of biases at different levels, including individual, team, and organization. By shifting the focus from debiasing to understanding the contextual adaptiveness of biases, this special issue seeks to inspire a more balanced view of bias across psychology and related disciplines.