Behavioral economics began with the intention of eliminating the psychological blind spot in rational choice theory and ended up portraying psychology as the study of irrationality. In its portrayal, people have systematic cognitive biases that are not only as persistent as visual illusions but also costly in real life—meaning that governmental paternalism is called upon to steer people with the help of “nudges.” These biases have since attained the status of truisms. In contrast, I show that such a view of human nature is tainted by a “bias bias,” the tendency to spot biases even when there are none. This may occur by failing to notice when small sample statistics differ from large sample statistics, mistaking people’s random error for systematic error, or confusing intelligent inferences with logical errors. Unknown to most economists, much of psychological research reveals a different portrayal, where people appear to have largely fine-tuned intuitions about chance, frequency, and framing. A systematic review of the literature shows little evidence that the alleged biases are potentially costly in terms of less health, wealth, or happiness. Getting rid of the bias bias is a precondition for psychology to play a positive role in economics.
An example from the paper:
Unsystematic Error Is Mistaken for Systematic Error
The classic study of Lichtenstein et al. [about causes of death] illustrates the second cause of a bias bias: when unsystematic error is mistaken for systematic error. One might object that systematic biases in frequency estimation have been shown in the widely cited letter-frequency study (Kahneman, 2011; Tversky and Kahneman, 1973). In this study, people were asked whether the letter K (and each of four other consonants) is more likely to appear in the first or the third position of a word. More people picked the first position, which was interpreted as a systematic bias in frequency estimation and attributed post hoc to the availability heuristic. After finding no single replication of this study, we repeated it with all consonants (not only the selected set of five, each of which has the atypical property of being more frequent in the third position) and actually measured availability in terms of its two major meanings, number and speed, that is, by the frequency of words produced within a fixed time and by time to the first word produced (Sedlmeier et al., 1998). None of the two measures of availability was found to predict the actual frequency judgments. In contrast, frequency judgments highly correlated with the actual frequencies, only regressed toward the mean. Thus, a reanalysis of the letter-frequency study provides no evidence of the two alleged systematic biases in frequency estimates or of the predictive power of availability.
You might be interested in Gigerenzer’s “bias bias” paper (reviewed here):
An example from the paper: