Aerial visuals play a central – and increasing – role in military operations, informing military decision-makers in real time. While adding relevant and time-sensitive information, these visuals construct an imperfect representation of people and spaces, placing additional burdens on decision-makers and creating a persuasive – yet misleading – virtual representation of the actual conditions on the ground. Based on interdisciplinary analysis of critical security studies, behavioural economics and international law literature, as well as rich data from US and Israeli military investigations into four military operations spanning from 2009 to 2021, this article identifies three types of challenges stemming from the mounting reliance on aerial visuals to inform military operations: technical challenges, relating to the technical capabilities and features of aerial vision technologies; cognitive challenges, relating to decision-making biases affecting human decision-makers; and human-technological challenges, relating to the human–machine interaction itself. The article suggests ways to mitigate these challenges, improve the application of the law of armed conflict, and protect people, animals and the environment during armed conflicts.

The environmental assessment literature has neglected the distorting effect of cognitive and unconscious motivational biases (CUMB) in environmental assessment processes. This is problematic because CUMB are present in most, if not all, decision-making situations and can significantly distort decision-making processes. This article assesses how debiasing techniques are, or should be, incorporated in (supra)national environmental assessment legislation. The Dutch case study undertaken for this article shows that EU and Dutch legislation do not sufficiently incorporate debiasing techniques to ensure sound environmental decision making. Furthermore, the extent to which Dutch legislation incorporates debiasing techniques was found to be decreasing. Based on these findings, the article presents ways to incorporate debiasing techniques in environmental assessment legislation more generally, and in EU and Dutch legislation in particular.

Are human beings irredeemably irrational? If so, why? In this article, I suggest that we need a broader appreciation of thought and reasoning to understand why people get things wrong. Although we can never escape cognitive bias, learning to recognize and understand it can help us push back against its dangers – and in particular to do so collectively and collaboratively.

Previous research suggests that people may develop stronger causal illusions when the existence of a causal relationship is consistent with their prior beliefs. In the present study, we hypothesized that prior pseudoscientific beliefs will influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative medicine and scientific medicine. Participants (N = 98) were exposed to an adaptation of the standard causal illusion task in which they had to judge whether two fictitious treatments, one described as conventional medicine and the other as alternative medicine, could heal the crises caused by two different syndromes. Since both treatments were completely ineffective, those believing that any of the two medicines worked were exhibiting a causal illusion. Participants also responded to the Pseudoscience Endorsement Scale (PES) and some questions about trust in alternative therapies that were taken from the Survey on the Social Perception of Science and Technology conducted by FECYT. The results replicated the causal illusion effect and extended them by revealing an interaction between the prior pseudoscientific beliefs and the scientific/pseudoscientific status of the fictitious treatment. Individuals reporting stronger pseudoscientific beliefs were more vulnerable to the illusion in both scenarios, whereas participants with low adherence to pseudoscientific beliefs seemed to be more resistant to the illusion in the alternative medicine scenario.

Improving the quality of life of captive animals is dependent on developing valid measures of how animals feel about their lives. It has recently been suggested that biases in information processing may offer a novel means of understanding animal emotions. Anxious and depressed people tend to interpret ambiguous information negatively. We explored the proposal that such cognitive biases also exist in non-human animals and could therefore be used as novel measures of animal welfare. We used a novel cognitive bias task based on a learnt taste aversion to determine whether birds deprived of environmental enrichment show biases in their classification of ambiguous signals. We hypothesised that starlings in enriched cages should be more likely to classify ambiguous signals as being associated with a positive outcome than starlings housed in standard, unenriched cages. Starlings were trained on a go/no-go procedure to discriminate between two visual stimuli (cardboard lids of white and dark grey) associated with outcomes of a different value (palatable and unpalatable mealworms hidden underneath). Individual birds' responses to unreinforced, intermediate stimuli (various shades of grey between white and dark grey) were subsequently examined while each bird was housed sequentially in both standard and enriched cages. The probability of a bird classifying an ambiguous pale grey lid as hiding a palatable mealworm was lower in standard cages than enriched cages, but this difference was found only in birds that received enriched cages first. Our results can be interpreted as showing a pessimistic bias in birds that have recently experienced a decline in environmental quality. These findings support the use of cognitive bias-based tasks as a novel, non-invasive technique for assessing welfare in non-human animals.

The Ratio-Bias phenomenon, observed by psychologist Seymour Epstein and colleagues, is a systematic manifestation of irrationality. When offered a choice between two lotteries, individuals consistently choose the lottery with the greater number of potential successes, even when it offers a smaller probability of success. In the current study, we conduct experiments to confirm this phenomenon and test for the existence of Bias as distinct from general irrationality. Moreover, we examine the effect of introducing a monetary incentive of varying size (depending on the treatment) on the extent of irrational choices within this framework. We confirm the existence of the Bias. Moreover, the existence of an incentive significantly reduces the extent of irrationality exhibited, and that this effect is roughly linear in response to changes in the size of the incentive within the magnitudes investigated.

This paper examines the effect of information processing styles (indexed by the Rational-Experiential Inventory of Pacini & Epstein, 1999) on adherence to bias judgments, and particularly to reverse biases; i.e., when two choice questions that comprise identical normative components are set in different situations and yield seemingly opposite behavioral biases. We found consistent evidence for a negative correlation between rational score and adherence to reverse biases, as well as overall biases, for all three pairs of reverse biases tested. Further, this effect of rational thinking was more pronounced for high experiential individuals, in that high-rational and high-experiential participants committed fewer biases than all other participants. These results lend weight to our claim that low-rational individuals, who are more sensitive to the context, are more prone to utilize some attribute of the provided information when it is uncalled for, but at the same time tend to ignore it or give it too little weight when it is a crucial factor in a normative decision process.

The aim of this paper was to develop a protocol to study the anticipatory response in cats as a measure of welfare. Seven experimental cats were trained in a classical conditioning paradigm to associate a sound with food arrival, while sound and food were presented without contingency in four control cats. Increasing the interval between sound and food up to 60 s allowed a detailed description of cats’ anticipatory response. Compared to control animals, experimental cats showed significantly shorter latencies to orient towards (average 2.96 s) and approach the source of the sound (12.98 s) as well as longer durations of exploring and standing by the source of the sound (namely 69.97 and 52.32%, respectively of the interval sound-food). Experimental cats also exhibited behaviours that may derive from predation patterns, eg short pauses and predatory crouch while approaching the source of the sound (namely in 28.93 and 29.64% of trials), rapid head movements while watching it (55.36% of trials) and pouncing on the food (9.29% of trials). This protocol should be further studied to assess its effectiveness in highlighting differences according to the welfare of individual cats.

The results of song contests offer a unique opportunity to analyze possible distortions arising from various biases in performance evaluations using observational data. In this study we investigate the influence of contestants’ order of appearance on their ranking. We found that, in the New Wave Song Contest, expert judgments were significantly influenced by the contestant’s running number, an exogenous factor that, being assigned randomly, clearly did not influence the output quality. We also found weaker statistical evidence of such an ordering effect in Eurovision Song Contest finals of 2009–2012.

The aim of this paper was to develop a protocol to study the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli in cats as a measure of welfare. Ten cats were trained to discriminate between a rewarded position (R) and an unrewarded one (U), as measured by the approach latency for each position. After discrimination, they were exposed to three ambiguous unrewarded positions (R-near, R/U-equidistant, U-near) distributed at intermediate points between R and U. Approach latency increased as increasing the distance from the rewarded position: latencies to approach R and R-near were significantly shorter than for R/U-equidistant, U-near and U. This protocol should be further studied to assess its effectiveness in highlighting differences according to the welfare level of individual cats.

We describe the “evaluability bias”: the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation. We propose that the evaluability bias influences decision making in the context of charitable giving: people tend to have a strong preference for charities with low overhead ratios (lower administrative expenses) but not for charities with high cost-effectiveness (greater number of saved lives per dollar), because the former attribute is easier to evaluate than the latter. In line with this hypothesis, we report the results of four studies showing that, when presented with a single charity, people are willing to donate more to a charity with low overhead ratio, regardless of cost-effectiveness. However, when people are presented with two charities simultaneously—thereby enabling comparative evaluation—they base their donation behavior on cost-effectiveness (Study 1). This suggests that people primarily value cost-effectiveness but manifest the evaluability bias in cases where they find it difficult to evaluate. However, people seem also to value a low overhead ratio for its own sake (Study 2). The evaluability bias effect applies to charities of different domains (Study 3). We also show that overhead ratio is easier to evaluate when its presentation format is a ratio, suggesting an inherent reference point that allows meaningful interpretation (Study 4).

When people judge risk or the probability of a risky prospect, single case narratives can bias judgments when a statistical base-rate is also provided. In this work we investigate various methodological and procedural factors that may influence this narrative bias. We found that narratives had the strongest effect on a non-numerical risk measure, which was also the best predictor of behavioral intentions. In contrast, two scales for subjective probability reflected primarily statistical variations. We observed a negativity bias on the risk measure, such that the narratives increased rather than decreased risk perceptions, whereas the effect on probability judgments was symmetric. Additionally, we found no evidence that the narrative bias is solely produced by adherence to conversational norms. Finally, changing the absolute number of narratives reporting the focal event, while keeping their relative frequency constant, had no effect. Thus, individuals extract a representation of likelihood from a sample of single-case narratives, which drives the bias. These results show that the narrative bias is in part dependent on the measure used to assess it and underline the conceptual distinction between subjective probability and perceived risk.

As implementers, public officials have historically enjoyed substantial influence in the public policy process, but little attention has been paid to the effect of psychological elements on their attitudes towards implementing policy instruments. The authors argue that from a behavioural public administration perspective, public officials’ attitudes towards implementing certain policy instruments are not rational, but instead biased. Using two survey experiments on 1,024 Chinese public officials, this study examines the cognitive and motivational bias of public officials’ attitudes towards implementing policy instruments. The findings indicate that when public officials are presented with risk information in a negative framing, they are more reluctant to implement indirect policy instruments than direct ones, and this phenomenon becomes more pronounced when their public interest orientation is activated, rather than their personal interest orientation. The findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of the effect of psychological biases on public officials’ attitudes towards policy implementation.