Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Investigations into human decision-making have led to the discovery of numerous cognitive biases and fallacies, with newones continually emerging, leading to a state of affairs which can fairly be characterized as the cognitive fallacy zoo! In thiswork, we formally present a principled way to bring order to this zoo. We introduce the idea of establishing implicationrelationships (IRs) between cognitive fallacies, formally characterizing how one fallacy implies another. IR is analogousto, and partly inspired by, the concept of reduction in computational complexity theory. We present several examples of IRsinvolving experimentally well-documented fallacies: base-rate neglect, availability bias, conjunction fallacy, decoy effect,framing effect, and Allais paradox. We conclude by discussing how our work: (i) allows for identifying those pivotalcognitive fallacies whose investigation would be the most rewarding research agenda, and (ii) permits a systematized,guided research program on cognitive fallacies, motivating influential theoretical as well as experimental avenues of futureresearch.