Des Linguisten Einführung zu menschlicher Fehlbarkeit und kognitiven Verzerrungen: deren Evolution, kognitiver Stellenwert und Einfluss auf die Entscheidungsfindung

Abstract

Most people, including many scientists, readily assume that human perception depicts reality truthfully, that human thought processes are essentially rational, and that episodic memory aptly stores and recalls factual information about personal experiences. However, these notions are only partially true. Of course, evolutionary pressures have culminated in an overall quite powerful cognitive system that allows humans to adequately cope with the circumstances present within their ecological niche(s), but nevertheless, perception of the outside world is subject to the brain’s “motivated” interpretation out of imperfect input, thinking is guided by heuristic shortcuts as well as a plethora of unconscious biases, and memory shows itself to be imperfect as well as malleable to a variety of influences. As a result, intuitive judgments on reality are, in principle, to a certain degree unreliable. Cognitive shortcomings constitute an intrinsic condition of human nature and profoundly impact how people interpret the world and interact with their material and social surroundings. This paper is motivated by the fact that many scholars within linguistics, as well as most students of the field, have little to no awareness of the pertinent literature, even though these biases may directly or indirectly influence their work. The following therefore aims to present a concise introduction to the topic, from the evolutionary background to practical implications within linguistic research.

Keywords

• perception
• cognitive biases
• linguistic theory
• linguistic methodology