Cognitive Bias as Default Setting: An Architectural Argument Against the Named-Bias Literature

A person's bias is the person, observable in how they judge anything they meet. It is the accumulated content their judgment is based on, present at every moment, shaping every output. The bias literature has treated bias as something else, an error against a standard the field imported from outside the person being judged. The treatment does not survive the architecture of the thinking it claims to measure. The defaults that produce bias are stored continuously, not triggered by conditions. A person carries their accumulated content whether or not any current input makes it visible. What changes situationally is the input the content meets, not whether the content switches on or off. The bias literature,…